Efforts to decipher the processes underpinning biological systems now have a plethora of approaches from which to choose. Transcriptomics and proteomics provide a global snapshot of the abundance of gene products in a sample, from which researchers can learn a great deal about the inner machinations of a cell. However, when attempting to piece together a roadmap of an organism's metabolism, these strategies illuminate only a portion of the cellular landscape, and the evidence provided is often once- or even twice-removed from the actual players (the metabolites) involved. In this issue of Physiologia Plantarum, Jia et al. (2020) used metabolomic approaches to directly analyse the molecular soup of substrates and products contained in plant cells (known as the metabolome) to unravel the metabolic and physiological differences separating a drought-sensitive and a drought-tolerant species of the ecologically and economically important woody plant, poplar.