The Botanics looks forward to hosting the next Botanical Society of Scotland's lecture on 15 October featuring Jonathan Silvertown.
Jonathan Silvertown talks about his new book*, offering an original and beguiling perspective on how plants really work—and how we truly depend on leaves for survival.
Leaves are so familiar that they are easy to overlook. Yet it is through leaves that plants perform their magic—not least building towers of wood from the unlikeliest of raw materials: a rare gas, a shower of rain, a heap of dung, and some sunlight.
Everything we eat that comes from the land began as a leaf. The air we breathe is cleaned by leaves. Much of the rainfall patterns of the earth depend on tree cover. A leaf is a solar panel, a rainmaker, a lunch box, a chemistry set, and a soil-maker.
The most basic questions about leaves 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? A tree is a river to the sky, carrying water from the soil into the clouds. More water is transpired through leaves than flows through all the streams and rivers on Earth—and the secret of this trick lies in the physics of the tiny pores in leaves.
But if you think leaves have reached the peak of efficiency, think again. 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. Leaves have evolved ingenious tricks to get around these problems—one of which might challenge your idea of why leaves are green.
*Nature’s Magicians: The Hidden power of leaves is published by Oneworld on October 8th 2026.
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With thanks to the Botanical Society of Scotland for creating this lecture series and welcoming our members to it. You can find out more about BSS here
Venue note: To access the lecture please enter via the Science Buildings main reception, 20A Inverleith Row, Edinburgh EH3 5LR and follow the signs to the Lecture Theatre.
Note this is NOT the public entrance to the Gardens.