Guttation is a prominent example of natural secretion, containing organic and inorganic solutes, by plant leaves. The oldest references related to guttation in this volume are the studies of de Saussure (1804) followed by the studies of Duchartre (1859) and Unger (1861) on the secretions of calcareous matters and other compounds and salts of leaves. The author of the book, Sanjay Singh, from the windows of his parents’ house saw guttation with its myriad brilliant drops glistering on the tips of leaves of rice plants in the early morning sunshine. He fell in love with guttation in his childhood. He followed it up throughout his professional academic life as a teacher, a researcher, and an author of a number of review articles. The present book is born out of this love.

The book is unique because until now no such treatise on guttation existed. It takes the important phenomenon of guttation out of unjustified relative negligence. The book is a comprehensive source of references on guttation with a remarkable completeness in coverage of the literature. Beyond that, the author provides far-reaching excursions into the background of how guttation and related phenomena such as root exudation are embedded in general in the various fascinating features of plant life including water relations and transport, solute transport, regulation in response to external and internal signals, and ecology. From this, it unfolds guttation as innovative emergence in the true sense of the term. Doing this, the author with over 600 references covers an immense breadth of the literature going back to the beginning of the 19th century and up to the most recent works on implications of molecular biology. Through this monumental work, the author has created a history on guttation research, which forays into many outlooks on further work and progress to be anticipated.

With techniques of sampling and quantification of guttation, inorganic and organic chemistry of guttation, biotic interactions with viruses, bacteria, fungi, and animals, and with pharmaceutical implications, the various chapters of the book, which can be taken as self-contained entities, evidently address a very broad audience interested in plant biology, ecology, agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry, pharmacology, and medicine.