Plants don't fit the word "behavior" in most people's minds, but experimental plant ecologist J.C. Cahill spends this film arguing they should. He travels from the Great Basin Desert to the rainforests of coastal western Canada, kneeling in the dirt to point out what is actually happening beneath the leaves: roots competing for space, chemical signals passing between neighboring plants, and species releasing compounds that summon predatory insects to attack the pests eating them. Cahill treats this as strategy rather than metaphor, walking through cases of plants that appear to recognize kin and adjust their growth to favor related seedlings over strangers. The film stays close to Cahill's own fieldwork and demonstrations rather than relying on narration alone, and his manner is plain and often funny even when the underlying research is technical. The picture that builds across these landscapes is of plant communities running on constant chemical negotiation, cooperation in some cases and open competition in others, all happening at a pace too slow for human eyes to register without a scientist pointing it out.