INTERVIEW: Author A. J. Colucci Delves Into the Eerie World of Plants With New Novel Seeders- Book Signing at Paramus Barnes and Noble July 17th

But author AJ Colucci doesn't. She's a suburban soccer mom, traipsing her kids about town, active in school organizations, hosting backyard BBQ's, but with a creative mind so much on overdrive that she has three books written and two more in the works.

I first met AJ through a PTA function. She was your everyday PTA mom and yet she wasn't. AJ always had an opinion and wasn't afraid to voice it. The passion always came through. I remember when we were working on one project together, a community activism project, and she mentioned how she was writing a book on what we were doing. But she prefaced it with, "but it's not exactly the same situation because in the book bad things happen to the people, like they keep getting murdered."  

That should have clued me in that this inventive, daring mind was always at work, participating, seeing, listening, grabbing and taking notes about the world around her.

Both AJ's first novel and now her second are deeply rooted in science. She insists that she never liked science as a child and still believes schools could do a better job at making it more interesting. Her passion for science developed later in life and she says that she found stories everywhere, in magazines like Nature and Discover, episodes of Nova and shows on PBS.

I had the chance to ask AJ a few questions about her new book, her life, and any words of wisdom she could impart to any budding writers out there seeking to create their own remarkable world for other curious minds to enjoy.

Q. Where did you get the idea for SEEDERS?

A. I guess I was about eight years old and read a short story by Roald Dahl called The Sound Machine, about an engineer who invents a device that allows him to hear high-frequency sounds, like the scream of a rose as it's being cut. The story was absolutely chilling and changed the way I thought about nature. I had that story in mind when I was researching my next book and looked online to see what was going on these days with plants. I was astounded to learn about all of the new breakthroughs in plant intelligence and a growing field of study called plant neurobiology. In one day, I knew that was going to be my next book.

Q. The science of SEEDERS is fantastical. is it based in reality? How did you learn about it?

A. All of the information on plants- their ability to learn, remember, use all five senses, attack prey, signal each other- is based in fact. I did a lot of research online, but interviewed plant biologists to make sure all  my facts were correct. Plant intelligence, or neurobiology, is a rather controversial topic and there have been a lot of articles written in the past decade.

Q.  So tell me some amazing facts you learned about while researching for SEEDERS.

A. Some things we’ve known for a hundred years, such as plants can feel pain, although we don’t know exactly what pain feels like to them. We only know they react to trauma just as we do. Plucking a leaf will send electrical signals through the organism in a way that’s similar to animals, resulting in the entire plant becoming depressed. They have what can be considered a heartbeat, and display a death spasm. Other discoveries are new. Their ability to learn and remember, and use all five senses. They can signal insects and send chemical warnings to each other. Did you know the lovely smell of fresh cut grass is actually your lawn screaming?

Every single day, new discoveries about plants are being made. Just recently a study came out by University of Missouri that shows plants can actually hear themselves being eaten alive.  Plants have many of the same abilities as animals but we haven’t bothered to look for them because we think of trees, flowers and shrubs as non-intelligent beings. Think of the word vegetative. There is one plant biologist who leads much of the research being done on plant signaling and he made a great comparison. He sees the pollination system of plants as a marketing campaign, where the plants are the sellers, the birds and bees are the customers, the pollen is the product and the bright colors and perfumes are the banners. Plants even engage in deceptive marketing. For instance, there are orchids that look like a certain female insect, which attracts males and tricks them into pollination. Really, the more we look at ways plants are similar to humans, the more similarities we find.