essay by EMANUELE COCCIA emanuele coccia is an italian philosopher, writer, academic, and veteran purple contributor. He is associate professor at the école des hautes études en sciences sociales in paris, and the author of the life of plants: a metaphysics of mixture, published by wiley, 2018 Plants perceive the world in a much more refined way than we do: they have more senses than we do, and their sensitive world is not simply divided into five great realms. They have memory, and make this memory their own body: a tree is the climatic archive of the years in which it lived. They interact with their fellow plants to communicate the arrival of enemies, including individuals belonging not only to different species but also to different kingdoms: flowers are some of the most extraordinary tools of inter-kingdom communication that have ever been invented. Plants know. They know perfectly well what happens around them….