How Send Word Home Began

I began Send Word Home after reading about the ways plants communicate and about the vast fungal networks running beneath the ground.

What stayed with me was not simply the science. It was the change in perspective.

We walk through a field and see individual trees, flowers, weeds and insects. We draw property lines, put up signs, widen roads and make decisions about what happens next. But what if the living world around us is receiving information too? What if it has its own ways of remembering, warning, verifying and preparing?

That became the premise of Send Word Home.

A FOR SALE sign appears in a field. The humans see a piece of property. The ravens see people measuring. The roots remember other disturbances. The worm checks the evidence. Fungal threads carry the report beneath the town. Seeds prepare to travel. Weeds volunteer to remain behind and report what happens.

The people are not villains. In fact, one of the things that mattered to me was that human affection and human understanding are not the same thing. The woman at the center of the story loves her plants. She talks to them. She has carried some of them from house to house for decades. Yet even she understands only part of the conversation taking place around her.

The book grew from one question:

What if the natural world knew what we were about to do before we understood it ourselves?

And then, the next question:What would those words, sent home, say?