Botanist, by Marc Jeanson et Charlotte Fauve, 2019, Editions Grasset & Fasquelle, in French

This French biographical essay takes us with great finesse and intelligence into the immense world of botanists who are, all together, discoverers, descriptors, travelers and adventurers. The manager of the Herbarium of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris reminds us that the botanist is not just the one who classifies dead leaves : above all, he is the one who discovers them, sometimes at the edge of the world, at his own risk, and tries to insert them into the classification of living things. And there is still a lot of work to do!

From the standpoint of plant intelligence, this book generates at least two reflections:

First, the concern that arises over the certainly necessary distance separating the scientist and the object of his observation: the plant, a dried, shelled plant, analyzed and classified. Because botanists first love living plants, this distance is even more complex.

Secondly, the huge project that the latest discoveries should bring to all the herbaria of the world: the necessary creation of a methodology, a grid for analyzing the level of sensitivity or intelligence, reactivity of plants. So that plants are no longer just physical description files in an herbarium, and become a resource, a behavior, an illustration of living things that can be linked to the world that needs them more and more.