Nature’s Magicians: How Leaves Conjure Up Our World

By Jonathan Silvertown

Solar panel, rainmaker, lunch box, chemistry set, shapeshifter, soil-maker, geometer and more...

Leaves are so familiar that they are overlooked. Yet it is through leaves that plants perform their magic, not least building wood towers from unlikely raw materials: a rare gas, a shower of rain, a heap of dung and some sunlight.

As the evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown shows in Nature’s Magicians, the basic questions about leaves remain unasked and have surprising answers. With leaves so vital to plant life, why did land plants have none for the first 50 million years of their evolution? Today there are easily more leaves on Earth than stars in our galaxy. What changed?

Leaves are rivers to the sky. They carry more water from the soil to the clouds than flows through all the streams and rivers on Earth – and the secret lies in the physics of the tiny pores in their surface. But that’s not to say that leaves have reached the peak of efficiency. Of the light energy reaching a leaf, only one per cent is usable in photosynthesis – and the rest can easily cause the leaf to overheat. Again, leaves have evolved ingenious tricks to cope – one of which might challenge your idea of why leaves are green.

An original and beguiling behind-the-scenes perspective on how plants really work – and how we truly depend on leaves for our survival.