Into the Green: Books About Plants

by Chris Thorogood
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4 books
From food security to carbon capture, plants are key to finding solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. There has never been a more important time to appreciate them. As someone with a scientific turn of mind and who loves plants, botany always fascinated me: as a child, I’d look at a plant and think ‘how does this work?’
As a botanist, I have dedicated my life to chasing, studying, and illustrating plants, but to many people, they are a green blur. Because they don’t move on our timescale, it’s easy to think of plants as being inanimate. Here are some books that bring them to life on the page.
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The Cabaret of Plants

Botany and the Imagination
Richard Mabey, 2015
This book is about seeing plants, which I take seriously as a botanist. The Cabaret of Plants brings to life an armful of animal-defying, communicating plants that dance across each page: from green predators engulfing insect prey to orchids that dupe insects into trying to mate with them. This veritable green cabaret has the power to change our view of plants as passive objects. Mabey’s message is that plants are not passive or victims; rather, they are vital, autonomous beings: appreciating them is vital for our very existence.

The Brief Life of Flowers

Fiona Stafford, 2019
‘I can measure my entire life with leaves and petals,’ begins Fiona, who then gives us vivid reflections of her childhood memories of flowers. The beauty of flowers has always inspired creative minds, from Botticelli to Beatrix Potter, and this is explained through a series of mini-essays that portray a miscellany of plants. One of the things I love about this book is that it gives as much time to conventionally beautiful flowers – sunflowers, poppies and so on – as it does to thistles.

The Nature-printer

A Tale of Industrial Espionage, Ferns & Roofing-lead
Simon Prett, Pia Östlund, 2016
Combining plants and art, this book is gently spell-binding. Talented artist and printmaker Pia Östlund describes how she makes a curious discovery: a set of prints in the library of Chelsea Physic Garden in London. This leads her to rediscover the lost technique of nature-printing while her co-author Simon Prett explores the history of this little-known art. Little snippets about fern hunting and facsimiles of fern fronds and seaweeds make this irresistible to dip into.

The Playground of the Far East

Walter Weston, 2017
Not a book you’d find on the shelf of your local bookstore, but worth the effort of hunting down. Weston was a clergyman, writer and mountaineer. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel the length and breadth of Japan conducting botanical surveys, and I truly identify with Weston’s descriptions of alpine Japan – its silence and solitude; its vast beauty. He creates powerful images of ‘tree-grown amphitheatres’ and water that ‘falls in three great leaps a thousand feet’. He takes us to a new world on every page.