Wiley Blevins是鼎鼎大名的英語教育專家，Scholastic經常請他來台灣辦phonics及閱讀講座。有一次在臺大活動中心演講完後，蘇正隆老師帶著他逛臺大校園，解說花草樹木各式各樣的生存策略，如木棉樹的瘤刺，榕屬植物的氣根與纏勒，白千層的樹皮，他聽得非常入迷，書寫一本介紹植物之奧妙的念頭油然而生。他說，“Jerome, 我決定要寫一本給兒童看介紹植物神奇的書。”三年後，Ninja Plants: Survival and Adaptation in the Plant World真的問世了。書的扉頁獻詞上赫然印著：To Jerome Su, who inspired this book after our walk through the campus grounds of National Taiwan University.

What can communicate but has no mouth, and can attack but has no hands? A plant! You might love the beauty and fragrance of flowers, but plants are far more complex than meets the eye. Some plants have ways of luring insects for pollination. Others mimic the look of the female insects whose male counterparts they want to attract. The Venus flytrap eats insects and other small animals for extra nourishment. You might see some of these ninja plants—with their sneaky and deceitful ways—in your own backyard. These plants might even be sitting on a windowsill in your home. This fascinating world of ninja plants is waiting to be discovered.

Kirkus Reviews:

The plant world includes many curiosities whose “sneaky” adaptations help ensure their survival and reproduction.

This slim introduction to botany offers an interesting and unusual invitation to young readers to look closely at the plant world. Chapter by chapter, Blevins describes plants whose smells repel, that eat insects, use stinging or poisonous defenses, imitate something else, or survive in extreme environmental conditions; plants that can move and even catch fire. The ninja comparison—"stealthy, fierce, and sometimes deadly”—is unevenly but perhaps too frequently made. It wears thin, but the variety and unexpectedness of Blevins’ examples will keep readers’ attention.The exposition is clear and broken up by well-captioned photographs and pullout sections describing further oddities (Mexican jumping beans, rainbow eucalyptus bark, the jabuticaba tree’s crying fruit, parasitic figs), varieties of mimicry, thermogenesis, and more. An introduction covers the basics of plant evolution, survival, and reproduction, and the concluding chapter discusses plant-human relationships, including human causes for global climate change and its effect on the plant world. Specialized vocabulary is defined in context.Although the author includes new information on horizontal gene transfer, many of his examples are not plants but fungi, now said to belong to a separate kingdom.