A nature writer’s favorite books about biodiversity, plants and natural magic

I love, love, love this book. What a gem, a prayer of love to plants and nature, a dense but light book of ‘indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants’ as it says in the sub-title.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a decorated Professor of Botany, a mother, a writer of grace, power, and elegance, a keeper and sharer of indigenous wisdom, and an overall generous human being. If there is one book you read this year, let it be this. It filled my heart with joy, hope, and wonder. I loved her other book, Gathering Moss, too.

Dr. Suzanne Simard is also a professor of Forest Ecology, but like Robin Wall Kimmerer (above), she has created a readable and personal book about her subject. Her research, undertaken over decades, set out to prove that trees communicate and cooperate and that they help each other, both within a species and between different species.

Her gripping story includes how she overcame a Male Chauvinist work environment and proved that a weed-killed monoculture was far from the most optimal way to manage forests. Her book is a reminder of how little we know of the incredibly complex biosphere we are privileged to be part of.

Elizabeth Kolbert is a respected science writer. In this book, she pieces together hard facts, historical background, and personal stories to help us understand the 6th extinction currently underway.

This deeply researched book doesn’t just leap to blame climate change (which is a factor) but looks at this loss of biodiversity through a much wider lens of humankind’s impact on our environment. Kolbert is a gifted writer and entertainer who finds ways to bring humor to this dark subject. 

This beautifully illustrated book is a biodiversity manifesto. Mary Reynolds is an Irish garden designer who became the youngest woman ever to win a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show. Her biggest contribution to gardening is her new initiative to bring biodiversity to gardens through this book and her organization, We Are The Ark.

Her mission is to move people from being gardeners to being guardians. Echoing a message in my latest book, Mary says we can’t wait for politicians to change things; we can start right away, in a back garden or a window box for apartment dwellers. This is an uplifting book that offers magical prose and illustrations. It guides the reader through how to rewild your patch (or your community patch/ school/ shared space), no matter the size, and why transforming from gardener to guardian is so crucial to us all. The book’s title, ‘ARK,’ stands for Acts of Restorative Kindness and is an invitation to be kind to the earth and yourself.

This book by Isabella Tree is the story of how Isabella and her husband, Charlie Burrell, transformed their massive 3500-acre farm in England (100 times the size of our organic farm in France) from an intensively farmed operation that was losing money into a conservation haven and an icon of rewilding or ‘wilding’ as Isabella has termed it. Questions remain about exactly how this model can work without subsidies and/or a heavy emphasis on tourism (they are less than 2 hours drive from London and offer glamping and more) and where/how serious food production fits into this picture.

That said, the other model of intensive farming at Knepp failed both economically and environmentally. Wilding at Knepp is far kinder to the land and the wider environment. It’s economically successful, employing far more people than it did as an intensive farm, and the environmental benefits are off the charts. This book is an important and engaging read.