The best books about plants and how our lives are woven with theirs

Nancy Turner is a renowned ethnobotanist whose work I have followed with excitement and pleasure my entire adult life. I am fascinated by her gathering, through good relations with the Haida people, a huge compendium of detailed information on the medicinal, technical, artistic and spiritual resources of people who’ve lived on a group of islands off B.C.’s northern coast since time immemorial.

It’s hard to imagine a better guide to a place than a book like this, which takes us deeply into a culture and its plants. Hats woven of spruce root, halibut hooks carved of yew, feast dishes filled with wild rhubarb and potatoes: I am dazzled by this book.

As someone who has traveled widely in Mediterranean countries, I love Patience Gray’s infectious enthusiasm for the extraordinary wild bounty of the region’s fields, forests, and shorelines. Moving from one small home to another with her sculptor husband across borders, she learns the landscapes and how to forage for the next meal.

She offers identification tips and ways to adapt traditional cooking methods to more contemporary contexts, and she immerses us in the rich history plants carry in their names, common and specific. She noted their use as medicinals and purposes for dyes and fiber. I was enchanted by the drawings, the folklore (Carrara saying: Who wants to eat a good supper should eat a weed of every kind), and the window she opens wide to a beautiful green world.

As an avid reader of biography, I was thrilled to discover this brilliant saga of George Orwell’s life as a journalist and activist and the rose bushes he purchased from Woolworths and planted in 1936 in an English garden.

The roses are a tangible presence in his participation in the Spanish Civil War and his support for women’s suffrage, universal justice, and human rights. I deeply admire how Solnit follows Orwell’s influence as a gardener and a humanist through a world hungry for his integrity and clarity of thought.

I am always grateful when a book introduces me to a place completely unknown to me. Janisse Ray’s gorgeous memoir does exactly that: southern Georgia's disappearing longleaf pine forests. Her introduction to this landscape is a gift to readers, who will yearn, as she does, for its regeneration after a century of exploitation.

Raised in a junkyard along a busy highway, this writer learned the land’s history through the stories of her parents and others; she learned the intricate ecology of the pines and their companion flora and fauna, almost lost to industry and greed. Lyrical and beautifully written, Ray’s evocations of complex plant communities linger in the mind long after you’ve finished the book.

I learned about botanical nomenclature as a 19-year-old, and it opened a world to me, a place where plants told me something about their origins and their function. This book gives me the background to the long history of naming.

Those who gathered plants, who learned their uses and needed to be accurate, also required a system that would allow them to write about their knowledge in a way that allowed others to use it and share it. From Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus in 4th century BE Athens to Islamic scholars to the 18th-century medical professor Carl Linnaeus, Anna Pavord immerses us in the search for meaning and sense in the world of plants.

It isn’t, not at all. It’s history at its best, populated by apothecaries, artists, botanists and scholars. And the illustrations are sublime.