"An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and...

Investigating three bizarre and apparently unrelated murders, officer Dora Henry is baffled when trees sprout overnight and turn the city into a teeming jungle, revealing to Dora strange clues about the killings and about the future.

Fern Verdant's mother, a famous botanist, disappears just before Fern's thirteenth birthday, and when Fern discovers that she has inherited the ability to communicate with plants, she realizes that this is the only way she will be able to find and save her mother.