The book I wanted to stockpile and burn in a blazing bonfire

"Autumn is a second Spring when every leaf is a flower." - Albert Camus

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Here in tree-festooned Canberra, the pageant of autumn is flamboyantly underway now as the leaves of deciduous trees turn all the colours of the rainbow (albeit a rainbow with strong golden and tangerine and crimson biases).

In these days I am doing considerable haunting of the deciduous forests of the National Arboretum, my innate drabness (not only of dress but also of personality) contrasting with the lurid gaiety, the barbarous beauty of the leaves of the arboretum's deciduous forests.

And so trees are much on my mind. Stay with me if for a few sentences I appear to stray out of the trees. I won't have gone far.

With book-banning so noisily in the news (a Western Sydney council has banned the parenting book Same Sex Parents from its libraries, exciting a frenzy of comment), I am being reminded of another book that richly deserved to be banned but that instead became a runaway best-seller, doing immense and lasting harm.

Yes, of course, I speak of Peter Tompkins' and Christopher Bird's 1973 bestseller, The Secret Life of Plants. The book is an anthropomorphic romp which convinced people that plants are just intelligent, green, vegetable versions of ourselves, that they enjoy being talked to by us and prefer listening to classical music rather than to pop, love watching The Simpsons, etc.

Even as I first read it, all those years ago (in my role as an intellectual snob, flora zealot and amateur botanist) I winced at its sheer sentimental unscientific awfulness. How I itched to make bonfires of heaped copies of it.

Now a new book, The Light Eaters by Zoe Schlanger, goes into some detail about the lasting damage the book did while alas, according to one slightly exasperated reviewer of The Light Eaters (see Laura Miller's review-essay Being Green - A new book marvels at the strangeness of plants-and tries a little too hard to explain how they're like people, committing lots of the same anthropomorphic sins The Secret Life of Plants commits.

It turns out that The Secret Life of Plants is now thought of by serious botanists as what Laura Miller calls "a cursed book". That's because it helped stoke and worsen the controversy raging among botanists about plant behaviour and about even using the word "behaviour" at all with regard to plants.

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Botanists told Schlanger that in the years following publication of The Secret Life of Plants, the aghast [US] National Science Foundation, feeling the book's irresponsible and unsubstantiated claims had tainted the entire field of plant behaviour research, stopped giving grants to anyone studying plants' responses to their environment.

Now Laura Miller, reviewing, sighs about how Schlanger's new book goes anthropomorphically on and on and on about the human-like "intelligence" and "consciousness" of plants. Here Ms Miller sings from the very same hymn book this columnist always tries to sing from on these matters.

"Human beings can't resist drawing parallels between themselves and other creatures," Laura Miller regrets.

"But [surely] one of the things we love most in plants is the enormous difference between them and us."

"The human looking to decompress from a rough day at the office certainly doesn't take a walk in the woods because trees are like people. The strangeness of plants; their (apparent) stillness and slowness; their resilience; their ability to survive on air, water, and dirt; their capacity to transform desolation into beauty, all in the course of pursuing their own unfathomable business: These are the unsung miracles [of plants, in Nature] that surround us daily.

"These characteristics don't need to be the result of 'intelligence' whatever that is. They may well be the product of forces so profoundly other that we'll never entirely understand them."

Yes, it is the otherness of trees, the unfathomability of the business (so still, so slow) they are going about, that makes them so fascinating to be among, in the arboretum and everywhere. One goes for solitary walks in the arboretum (instead of going to places teeming with people) precisely because the company of trees and the company of other people make for such different experiences.

For me, my fellow man and woman lack all mystique now (over my 78 years I have completely fathomed them and am simultaneously bored and appalled by them) while trees are deeply weird and radiate an exciting strangeness we may never fathom.

We don't even know, walking among them and marvelling at their barbarously beautiful autumn colours (at the moment the arboretum's maples, liquidambars, ginkos and beech trees are especially startling and eye-smiting) that they even notice us.

Previously, misguidedly, I have wondered if trees should be given the vote. Think what a difference the enfranchised trees of the arboretum, surely voting Green-Labor, might make in October's looming ACT election!

But of course it was anthropomorphic of me (I blush the colour of a reddy-pink maple leaf to recall doing it) to imagine that they, trees, going about their unfathomable and long-drawn out business, know and care about our species' politics, our elections of ephemeral four-year-term governments.