Plant Attack: The Fascinating Ways Flora Defends Itself, written by Erin Silver and illustrated by Julie McLaughlin. Orca, 2025. $21.95 ages 8 and up

 

"Passionflowers
Daring Disguise

This colorful exotic flower has a sneaky disguise. The
yellow spots on its leaves look just like butterfly eggs.
If a female Heliconius butterfly comes looking for a 
cozy place to leave her eggs, she'll see the spots and
keep on going. She doesn't like to leave her eggs on
a leaf that's already taken. This "do not disturb"
sign is one of a few ways passionflowers have evolved
to keep themselves safe." 

Plant Attack is a companion book to Mighty Scared: The Amazing Ways Animals Defend Themselves (Orca, 2024). In it, readers are made aware of 13 plant species and the defense mechanisms they have to protect themselves when faced with danger. They can be plenty fierce, having adapted in 'cool and courageous' ways to protect their existence in the natural world. 

Ms. Silver begins with the rose, the oldest flower in the world, and its pointy prickles. Many readers will be familiar with them, and the surprise felt when handling a rose for the first time. Those thorns hurt! Its two-page spread offers a Fierce Fact, a description of the plant and its defense system, and a GET TO KNOW ME! first-person accounting of what is important about the plant itself. 

Each plant described is presented using the same format, and accompanied by sunny, detailed digital illustrations that add context and interest for young readers. Included are roses, poison ivy (and its cousins, poison oak and poison sumac), corpse flower, orchids, touch-me-not balsams, barrel cactuses, glow-in-the-dark mushrooms, the aforementioned passionflowers, coconuts, bladderworts, Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, and hydrillas. As often happens with books like this, some plants are familiar and others not so. It's always fun to learn something new - for children and adults.  

"The bladderwort trap opens and closes faster than the 
 blink of an eye. Scientists say bladderworts are the 
fastest carnivorous plant on the planet - something they
couldn't see until they began filming the plant in 
action and playing it back in slow motion."