The Secret Life of Plants, by Tompkins, Peter and Christopher Bird
Inventory #: 01356
Price: $12.00

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The Secret Life of Plants, by Tompkins, Peter and Christopher Bird. Harper & Row: New York, 1972. Edition: No indication of edition. ISBN: 0060143266. Hardcover, 8v, 6 by 8.5 inches, 402 pages. Cream-colored cloth; brown lettering on spine. Illustrated with black and white woodcut-style illustrations. Includes Bibliography and Index.

Condition: Very Good in a Good jacket. Lower spine end bumped; lower corners a bit worn. Jacket has a 1 1/2 inch closed tear on the back and chipping at spine ends and corners.

Contents: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Published in 1973, The Secret Life of Plants was written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. It is described as "A fascinating account of the physical, emotional, and spiritual relations between plants and man."

Essentially, the subject of the book is the idea that plants may be sentient, despite their lack of a nervous system. This sentience is observed primarily through changes in the plant's conductivity, as through a polygraph (debunked by the Mythbusters), as pioneered by Cleve Backster. The book also contains a summary of Goethe's theory of plant metamorphosis.

With that being said, this book is about much more than just plants, and delves quite deeply into such topics as the aura, psychophysics, orgone, radionics, kirlian photography, magnetism / magnetotropism, bioelectrics, dowsing, and the history of science.

It was the basis for the 1979 documentary of the same name featuring the Stevie Wonder soundtrack Journey through the Secret Life of Plants. The film made heavy use of time-lapse photography (where you can see plants grow in a few seconds, creepers reaching out to other plants and tugging on them, mushrooms and flowers popping open, etc.), certainly in order to portray them as animate beings. When the film was released, such images were novelty to the general public