I love nature and feature it in many of my books, including a poetry collection about the ocean and a board book series about famous naturalists. As a gardener, I have trouble with outside plants thanks to the deer that live in the canyon out back. However, I have 50 houseplants and an herb garden in pots on the balcony. Our house is surrounded by trees, and one of my favorite places in the world is Sequoia National Park, with its green meadows and giant sequoia trees. We spent several summers there when I was a child.
This author is well known for her nonfiction picture books that clearly explain science topics, in this case, the growth of plants. Step by step, Gibbons walks young readers through pollination, the growth of seeds, and how seeds are distributed, such as by squirrels and birds. Then she goes on to talk about how plants grow. The whole process is reader-friendly, and the illustrations are clean and attractive. A great introduction for kindergarten through third graders.
Flowers, trees, fruits—plants are all around us, but where do they come from?
With simple language and bright illustrations, non-fiction master Gail Gibbons introduces young readers to the processes of pollination, seed formation, and germination. Important vocabulary is reinforced with accessible explanation and colorful, clear diagrams showing the parts of plants, the wide variety of seeds, and how they grow.
The book includes instructions for a seed-growing project, and a page of interesting facts about plants, seeds, and flowers. A nonfiction classic, and a perfect companion for early science lessons and curious young gardeners.
As the author of the Dr. Josephine Plantae Paradoxes, a historical mystery series based on my grandmother, an early trailblazing woman doctor, I stay true to the facts. I remember entering her apothecary filled with strange bottles of little homeopathic white pills, giant stills, and finding poisonous plants in her atrium. In my novels, Dr. Josephine Reva fights for woman’s equality and practices a mix of botanical and modern medicine, and moonlights as a sleuth to solve paradoxical ‘poison cure’ crimes. An award-winning journalist, author, and former professor with an MS from Columbia University, I studied botany. I currently live between France and New England with my family, furry friends, and lots of plants.
This is an illustrated novel that originated with an actual poison garden created by the Duchess of Northumberland at her estate in northern England.
This garden at Alnwick Castle is full of poisonous plants and served as the setting for scenes in several Harry Potter movies.
The Poison Diaries unfolds like a fable, about a teenage girl, Jessamine, daughter of a poison plant botanist, who must tend to the poison plants by herself. That is, until a boy named Weed appears.
The novel vividly describes the germination of Atropa Belladonna, with its deadly black berries. This beautifully illustrated book about a poison plant gardener is truly enchanting.
Jessamine has spent her whole life in a cottage close to her father's apothecary garden, surrounded by medicinal plants and herbs that could kill her - although her father has never allowed her into the most dangerous part of the grounds... the poison garden. And so she's never had reason to be afraid - until now. Because now a newcomer has come to live with the family, a quiet but strangely attractive orphan boy named Weed.
Ever since my childhood on a farm poetry has helped me pay attention to the world around me. Like a naturalist’s field guide, nature poems name, depict, and explore what might otherwise pass unnoticed. Now in the midst of environmental crisis I believe poets have a role alongside ecologists, farmers, and foresters to protect and restore our threatened habitats and species. Writing nature poetry helps me face and express loss while celebrating what still survives. I value poetry that connects us to what we love and gives us courage to imagine different ways of living.
What’s distinctive about this gorgeous poetry anthology is not only that each poem has a specific tree or flower as its subject but that they are grouped according to plant family.
The editor Sarah Maguire was a gardener as well as a poet and translator. In what was clearly a labour of love she brought together poems from all over the world, spanning eight centuries of writing. Her fascinating introduction considers many aspects of nature poetry, including gender and colonialism.
As a gardener and poet I have loved finding poems by Medbh McGuckian, Emily Dickinson and D.H. Lawrence grouped together in the Gentian family or poems by Louise Glück, Seamus Heaney, Lorna Goodison, Robert Herrick, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur thriving next to each other in the Mint family.
This new anthology is as entrancing as the lost gardens of Heligan - I cannot imagine an anthology anyone would enjoy more.' Ruth Padel, The IndependentThis beautifully compiled and designed anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English. Fourteenth-century lyrics sit next to poems of the twenty-first century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry from further afield, creating a cornucopia of intriguing juxtapositions. There are thirty poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South…
My interest in ghosts is partly due to growing up in York, which is one of the most haunted cities in the UK. In that city, I think that pretty much every pub has its own ghost, and if you’re unlucky (or lucky) enough, you stand a good chance of spotting long-dead Roman soldiers, plague victims, or ghostly dogs as you walk the streets. This atmosphere has seeped into my fiction; I have written two novels of the supernatural and am currently working on a third. I’ve also made a study of the grim and gothic in fiction; my Ph.D. thesis was largely about vampires (especially Dracula) but also strayed into other monsters and uncanny stories over the past two centuries.
When I was younger, I stayed overnight in a haunted house, or at least a house that felt haunted. I was in a big, creepy room by myself, and sleep was impossible. Instead, I sat up through the night, feeling very alone. During that long wait for dawn, this book was there for me.
It’s a satire that’s now more famous than many of the grim rural novels that inspired it; more important to me then, it’s the very funny story of Flora Poste, a modern young woman who goes to stay at a remote country farm with her relatives, the dramatic Starkadders, ruled over by Aunt Ada Doom, who once saw something nasty in the woodshed. Flora’s story is a glorious triumph of common sense over an ominous atmosphere.
When the sukebind was in bud, the orphaned Flora Poste, expensively, athletically and lengthily educated, descended on her relatives at Cold Comfort Farm, which she rightly imagines will be awful in an interesting way. She takes it on herself to bring order into chaos.
I’m a person who thinks gardening could be one of the most important endeavors anyone can do. I’m a writer, a speaker, and the recipient of eight Garden Communicators International media awards, including a Gold in 2021 for my column, “Rooting for You,” on the Hartley-Botanic Greenhouse website. My byline has appeared in numerous magazines such as Fine Gardening, Horticulture, Sunset, and This Old House. I’m always interested in great ideas for problem-solving in the garden.
If you want to save the natural world, you have to love it first. And to love it, you have to know it. This gorgeously illustrated picture book is an important introduction. Growencourages readers to be friends with fifteen common plants—from mint to orchids. Once recognized, and by learning a fascinating bit about them, these plants are no longer strangers, but companions. And that’s the beginning of love. The delightful drawings and fabulous plant factoids call for a read-aloud to younger children, or simply hand the book over to those already reading. This is an act of legacy—we need to bring along that next generation of passionate gardeners who will value our planet.
Discover 15 plants with incredible powers, then learn how to grow them. Meet each plant’s surprising relations (did you know the tasty tomato is a cousin of deadly nightshade?) and discover their history (bromeliads defended themselves against dinosaurs!). Then, follow the step-by-step instructions to grow and care for each plant, whether you have a big backyard or a sunny windowsill.
This fully illustrated guide to growing is the perfect introduction to plants for families everywhere.
During two decades as a gardening columnist for the Toronto Star, I wrote about hundreds of different plants. I also penned, for various publishers, over half a dozen books with titles ranging from Incredible Edibles: 40 Fun Things to Grow in the City and The Untamed Garden: A Revealing Look at our Love Affair with Plants. And in doing so, I got hooked. Even if you aren’t interested in gardening, the botanical world is chock-a-block with terrific stories. My new novel, for instance, published in 2022, begins with an extraordinary tale about a plant called The Corpse Flower which bloomed for the first time in 70 years at Brooklyn Botanical Garden.
This book is fairly new, by an Aussie environmental historian. I got hooked from the first page because, once again, it’s well written and I learned stuff about plants that I didn’t know already. The Wardian Case was a kind of travelling greenhouse designed by an English amateur naturalist named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in Victorian times. His simple invention made it possible to send plants around the world on the decks of sailing ships -and resulted in the huge array of species for sale in garden centres today. Beautiful plants that we now take for granted -like roses, rhododendrons, magnolias, wisteria, countless ferns, and more—travelled thousands of miles from their countries of origin in these unpretentious but surprisingly efficient boxes. A great story, with good photos.
The story of a nineteenth-century invention (essentially a tiny greenhouse) that allowed for the first time the movement of plants around the world, feeding new agricultural industries, the commercial nursery trade, botanic and private gardens, invasive species, imperialism, and more.
Roses, jasmine, fuchsia, chrysanthemums, and rhododendrons bloom in gardens across the world, and yet many of the most common varieties have roots in Asia. How is this global flowering possible? In 1829, surgeon and amateur naturalist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward placed soil, dried leaves, and the pupa of a sphinx moth into a sealed glass bottle, intending to observe the moth…
Chris Thomas is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist who is interested in how people are changing the Earth’s biodiversity. He has written over 300 scientific articles on topics as varied as showing that animal species have shifted their distributions closer to the poles as the climate has warmed, how butterflies navigate fragments of remaining habitats as they move through human-altered landscapes, and how invasive plants are increasing rather than reducing biological diversity. Chris is today Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity at the University of York in England. His popular book Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction was among The Times, Economist & Guardian Books of the Year for 2017.
This book is full of surprises, taking
on the thorny issue of where different species come from, where people think
they belong, and what people are doing about it. Written in an entertaining
way, Ken Thompson takes on those who hate and try to kill species simply
because they perceive them to be in the wrong place. First, he establishes the
science, pointing out that many species evolved in places that you wouldn't
guess…. Camels did not evolve in western Asia or North Africa originally, but I
won’t spoil the story.
Most species evolved somewhere but today survive
somewhere else. This is obvious to someone like Thompson, whose career
has been based in Sheffield in England, which was at the edge of an ice sheet a
mere 20,000 years ago. Virtually all of the species that live in and
around Sheffield today only colonised the area in the last 10,000…
The ecologist and author of Do We Need Pandas? “presents a stimulating challenge to our perceptions of nature” and non-native species (George Monbiot).
You may be surprised to learn that camels evolved and lived for tens of millions of years in North America—and also that the leek, national symbol of Wales, was a Roman import to Britain, as were chickens, rabbits and pheasants. These classic examples highlight the issues of “native” and “invasive” species. We have all heard the horror stories of invasives wreaking havoc on ecosystems. But do we need to fear invaders?
If I'm honest, I became a gardener because I like getting dirty. Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Tom Kitten is the story of my childhood (and my adulthood too, only now I don't have to pretend I'm going to stay clean). Of course, high-quality soil leads to high-quality produce, and I deeply adore the flavors of strawberries growing in deep, dark soil. Biting into a juicy, homegrown tomato still warm from the summer sun is bliss.
If you only grow from the last frost to the first frost, your gardening season is extremely short. But a few simple season-extension techniques can mean you harvest fresh food nearly every day of the year. I've used Eliot Coleman's crop suggestions and his quick hoops and can say from experience that they make all the difference during the cold season.
"Brimming with ingenuity, hope, and eminently practical advice, The Winter Harvest Handbook is an indispensable contribution."-Michael Pollan
"Useful, practical, sensible, and enlightening information for the home gardener."-Martha Stewart
With The Winter Harvest Handbook, everyone can have access to organic farming pioneer Elliot Coleman's hard-won experience. Gardeners and farmers can use the innovative, highly successful methods Coleman describes in this comprehensive handbook to raise crops throughout the coldest of winters.
Building on the techniques that hundreds of thousands of farmers and gardeners adopted from Coleman's The New Organic Grower and Four-Season Harvest, this book focuses on growing produce of unparalleled freshness…
This
book is complete picture book perfection. It’s got a classroom of kids, a
seemingly unremarkable plant named Jerry, a patient teacher who’s smarter than
he seems, frustration, problem-solving, creativity, love, growth, humor, and
the absolutely most unexpected but perfect ending a picture book could ever hope
for. And, it is exceedingly well-written.
I’m a hard sell when it comes to picture
books making me laugh, but this one got me. And, it’s charming as heck. So
charming. You’ll never look at a houseplant the same after reading this story.
Trust me: You need this book! And so do
any children in your life.
An irresistible picture book about a boy and his classmates who long for a class pet, but discover the joys and rewards of nurturing a class plant.
Room 107 has a cockatiel. Room 108 has a chinchilla. Even the Art Room has a bearded dragon. But in Room 109, Arlo's classroom, there is a plant. A mostly green, hardly growing, never moving plant. Even though it doesn't squeak, whistle, or whimper, Arlo’s teacher says the plant is “more than enough excitement for us.” But what could possibly be exciting about a plant?
A house plant in my living room attacked another plant, wrapping itself around it and killing it. Then another plant tried to sink roots into a neighbor. I began to do a little research, then a lot of research, and learned that plants accomplish amazing feats. They can tell by the angle of the sun when spring is coming, and they can call parasitic wasps to rid themselves of caterpillars. Plants vastly outweigh and outnumber animals, so they run this planet. What if, on another planet, they could think like us… and that’s why I wrote a novel.
If you don’t know much about what plants can do, this is a great place to start.
Learn what a plant sees, smells, and feels. Yes, they can do all that. They know what color shirt you’re wearing. They can smell the warning from a neighbor plant being eaten by a bug. They know when you touch them. They know where they are, and they remember things. Plants are not passive, and they are acutely aware of the world around them.
How does a Venus flytrap know when to snap shut? Can it feel an insect's spindly legs? How do flowers know when it's spring? Can they actually remember the weather? And do they care if you play them Led Zeppelin or Bach? From Darwin's early fascination with stems and vines to "Little Shop of Horrors", we have always marvelled at plant diversity and form. Now, in "What a Plant Knows", the renowned biologist Daniel Chamovitz presents an intriguing and refreshing look at how plants experience the world. Highlighting the latest research in plant science, he takes us into the lives…
