Stefano Mancuso, the botanist who insists plants are intelligent

Stefano Mancuso

Photo: Editori Laterza / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 9, 1965 Catanzaro
Occupation	Biologist
Awards	Premio Nazionale di Divulgazione Scientifica · Wissenschaftsbuch des Jahres, Austria · Premio Galileo per la divulgazione scientifica · Fiorino d'oro, City of Florence

In Holy Wood Dust, Victor Kossakovsky’s documentary about trees, the camera stays on a stump in the instant after its tree has been felled and asks what that tree might have registered as it fell. The question comes from the man who wrote the film with him. Stefano Mancuso has spent most of his working life arguing that plants perceive their surroundings, make choices, learn and remember, and that the honest word for all of this is intelligence. Many of his colleagues think the word is wrong. Readers and audiences, in Italy and far beyond it, have taken his side faster than the scientific journals have, and that gap between the public he has won and the discipline he still has to persuade is what makes him worth reading closely.

He came to plants late. Mancuso grew up in Catanzaro, in Calabria, and has said that his interest in the vegetable world arrived only at university in Florence, where he studied and where he still teaches. The University of Florence has been his entire institutional life. He joined its faculty, took the chair of general arboriculture and plant ethology, and turned a corner of its agriculture department into the place the rest of the world now associates with one contested phrase.

Mancuso, who was born on 9 May 1965, became a professor in Florence in 2001 and in 2005 founded the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, known as LINV. The name was a provocation by design. Plants have no neurons and no brain; what Mancuso and collaborators such as František Baluška proposed was that they manage without them. A 2004 paper he co-signed described a zone near the tip of the root that integrates signals in ways the authors compared to brain function. A 2006 review in Trends in Plant Science set out plant neurobiology as a field of its own: electrical and chemical signalling, the hormone auxin acting much like a neurotransmitter, and roots that respond to gravity, moisture, pressure and damage. Later work with Monica Gagliano and Daniel Robert added sound to that list.

The laboratory gave him data; the stage gave him an audience. Mancuso spoke at TEDGlobal in 2010, the same year he lectured at Oxford on how roots search the soil for water and space. In 2013 Michael Pollan put the plant-intelligence argument, and Mancuso at the centre of it, in front of the readers of The New Yorker. That year he also published, with the journalist Alessandra Viola, the book that reached English readers as Brilliant Green, with a foreword by Pollan. Its German edition was named Austria’s science book of the year in 2016. The Revolutionary Genius of Plants followed, arguing that plants solved problems of energy, materials and decentralised decision-making long before humans thought to ask, and The Nation of Plants imagined the constitution that plants would write for the planet if they were a country.

He has tried to turn the argument into hardware as well as prose. Mancuso took part in Plantoid, a European project that built a robot modelled on growing roots, meant to explore soil that people cannot safely reach. In 2014 he helped launch a University of Florence spin-off working on plant biomimetics, whose floating, self-sufficient greenhouse, the Jellyfish Barge, was put to the Chilean government in 2016. Fitopolis, in 2023, carried the same thinking into urban planning, with the city redesigned around how plants organise themselves.

The resistance has been as steady as the success. In 2007, thirty-six plant scientists led by Amedeo Alpi signed a letter in Trends in Plant Science titled “Plant neurobiology: no brain, no gain?”, taking issue with the very name of the field. Mancuso co-signed the reply. Most of the underlying findings are not in dispute; signalling in plants is real and well documented. The quarrel is over what those findings should be called, and over where Mancuso has taken them since. He has argued that plants have a form of consciousness, a view the majority of plant scientists reject, and he has called for plants to be given rights. His defence of the second idea is pragmatic rather than mystical: protecting plants, he says, protects the people who depend on them for oxygen and food. Critics such as the French forest ecologist Jacques Tassin have warned that the popular literature on plant intelligence over-interprets the science, and a reading public charmed by the idea of thinking trees does not always see where the data stops and the metaphor starts.

None of that has slowed him down. Since March 2026 he has hosted La pelle del mondo, a six-part Rai Cultura series on Rai 3 about the biosphere and the role of plants in what comes next, written with Davide Savelli and presented alongside the actor Lillo. He also writes and voices the Chora Media podcast Alberi e altri umani, and in January 2026 he presented his latest book, Il Cantico della terra, which takes Saint Francis’s hymn to creation as a starting point for an ecological argument. His recognition is largely Italian and largely for communicating science: the national award for science popularisation in 2013, the Premio Galileo in 2018 for The Revolutionary Genius of Plants, and the Fiorino d’oro of the City of Florence in 2022. He is a member of the Accademia dei Georgofili.

Holy Wood Dust is where those strands meet. Mancuso shares the screenplay credit with Kossakovsky and appears on screen as the film follows Christmas trees from nursery forest to felling, transport and, after the holidays, the pavement. The Italian, Spanish and German co-production premiered out of competition in the Venice Open section of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival in September 2026. Reviewing it for Screen Daily, Jonathan Romney admired its beauty and technical mastery but found it less revelatory than Kossakovsky’s best work, a verdict that echoes the debate around Mancuso himself: hardly anyone questions the images, and plenty question what they are made to mean.

The film has since travelled to DOK Leipzig, with the Viennale, Ji.hlava and IDFA on its route, and it opens in German cinemas through mindjazz pictures on 3 December 2026, just as the tree lots fill with the firs it watches fall. For a scientist who has always preferred to argue in public, it is the largest audience his idea has had so far.

Tags: Holy Wood Dust, Stefano Mancuso, Victor Kossakovsky, botanists, La pelle del mondo, Michael Pollan