100 books like Orwell's Roses

By Rebecca Solnit,

Here are 100 books that Orwell's Roses fans have personally recommended if you like Orwell's Roses. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of The Gardener's Year

Ngoc Minh Ngo Author Of In Bloom: Creating and Living With Flowers

From my list on why everyone loves gardening.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a photographer of gardens and botanical still-lifes. I have a passion for plants and flowers and love reading about their historical and cultural significance. I am always curious about the meanings that humankind has ascribed to flowers in different cultures and eras. I have written and photographed three books that revolve around my passion for flowers.

Ngoc's book list on why everyone loves gardening

Ngoc Minh Ngo Why did Ngoc love this book?

This is a very slim volume by the Czech novelist, playwright, and essayist who gave us the word “robot” in a play in 1921. In this book, Capek takes readers through a year, month by month, in his backyard garden in Prague. The writing is full of humor, the tone conversational, with observations that resonate with all gardeners–from the fickleness of the weather to the pleasures of reading plant catalogues in the winter. But the true subject of Capek’s musing is the complexity of human nature. For the writer, the garden is a metaphor for what makes us human. It is ultimately a very hopeful book, and Capek ends it with these words: “The right, the best is in front of us. Each successive year will add growth and beauty. Thank God that again we shall be one year farther on!”  

By Josef Capek, Karel Capek,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Gardener's Year as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"This very entertaining volume with its delightfully humorous pictures should be read by all gardeners." — Nature
"Mr. Čapek writes with sympathy, understanding, and humor." — The New York Times
"Has a mellowness and a charm that give it a high place in the humorous literature of gardening … will delight the amateur gardener, and indeed everyone else." — Saturday Review
The creator of this book is best known internationally as the author of R.U.R., the science-fiction play that introduced the term "robot" to the world. Karel Čapek's satiric gifts take a different turn in this impishly comic book, which…


Book cover of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Paolo Squatriti Author Of Weeds and the Carolingians: Empire, Culture, and Nature in Frankish Europe, AD 750-900

From my list on how plants make human history happen.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an early medieval European historian who, in the last decades, branched out into environmental history. Having grown up in semi-rustic conditions, I have always been curious about rural things and past agricultural practices. I watch carefully as plows slice through fields, mind how birds and bees weave together their ecosystems, and pay attention to the phases by which trees put on and take off their leaves. Now a professional historian, my job involves reading a lot of rural and environmental history, so I have developed a good sense of books that mix academic rigor and approachability.

Paolo's book list on how plants make human history happen

Paolo Squatriti Why did Paolo love this book?

“The face that launched a thousand ships,” as Homer would say. Pollan’s witty and well-written treatment of how plants think and act to modulate their environments inspired 21st-century “critical plant studies” in the Anglophone world, including mine.

The book starts you thinking about the thousands of ways plants elbow into your world and how much they matter to your existence on earth, in economic but also spiritual senses. You end up agape in wonder.

By Michael Pollan,

Why should I read it?

9 authors picked The Botany of Desire as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A farmer cultivates genetically modified potatoes so that a customer at McDonald's half a world away can enjoy a long, golden french fry. A gardener plants tulip bulbs in the autumn and in the spring has a riotous patch of colour to admire. Two simple examples of how humans act on nature to get what we want. Or are they? What if those potatoes and tulips have evolved to gratify certain human desires so that humans will help them multiply? What if, in other words, these plants are using us just as we use them? In blending history, memoir and…


Book cover of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

Theresa Kishkan Author Of Mnemonic: A Book of Trees

From my list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in a coastal landscape and aspired from childhood to read my way through it by knowing its plants. I once watched a master carver at work on a totem pole at a living museum and could relate the wood curls falling from his adze to the giant cedars growing at the site. As a university student, I worked in a botanical show garden, learning so much about the provenance of plants and what they tell us about geography, history, and beauty. These experiences, in childhood and early adulthood, formed my lifelong interest in ethnobotany, nomenclature, and mythology, explored through the lens of creative work.

Theresa's book list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs

Theresa Kishkan Why did Theresa love this book?

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.

By Janisse Ray,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Ecology of a Cracker Childhood as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From the memories of a childhood marked by extreme poverty, mental illness, and restrictive fundamentalist Christian rules, Janisse Ray crafted a "heartfelt and refreshing" (New York Times) memoir that has inspired thousands to embrace their beginnings, no matter how humble, and to fight for the places they love. This new edition updates and contextualizes the story for a new generation and a wider audience desperately searching for stories of empowerment and hope.

Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1, hidden from Florida-bound travelers by hulks of old cars. In language at once colloquial, elegiac, and informative, Ray…


Book cover of The Land Where Lemons Grow: The Story of Italy and Its Citrus Fruit

Marc Millon Author Of Italy in a Wineglass: The Taste of History

From my list on food and wine that take you places and allow you to travel in time.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been researching and writing about wine, food, and travel for over 40 years (my first book, The Wine and Food of Europe, co-authored with my photographer wife Kim Millon, was published in 1982). I love to travel, I love to eat, and I love to drink wine. Most of all, I am interested in placing food and wine within a cultural and historical context. I have a weekly podcast, “Wine, Food, and Travel with Marc Millon,” which allows me to explore these topics by speaking directly to people. I hope you enjoy the books on my list as much as I do.

Marc's book list on food and wine that take you places and allow you to travel in time

Marc Millon Why did Marc love this book?

I could almost immediately smell the gorgeous scent of citrus wafting from the pages of this beautiful book through the magic of Helena Atlee’s precisely detailed writing.

Who would have thought that the story of Italy’s varied and numerous citrus plantations would take me on a journey all across the country, from Sicily’s west coast to the fragrant lemon gardens of Lake Garda, and in time from when the Arabs introduced bitter oranges up to the workings of the citrus industry today.

I love this book because it simply tells the fragrant story of how fruit, in various manifestations, has come to be cultivated all around the country and to represent something of the soul and the spirit of the Italian people.

By Helena Attlee,

Why should I read it?

6 authors picked The Land Where Lemons Grow as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Land Where Lemons Grow is the sweeping story of Italy's cultural history told through the history of its citrus crops. From the early migration of citrus from the foothills of the Himalayas to Italy's shores to the persistent role of unique crops such as bergamot (and its place in the perfume and cosmetics industries) and the vital role played by Calabria's unique Diamante citrons in the Jewish celebration of Sukkoth, author Helena Attlee brings the fascinating history and its gustatory delights to life.

Whether the Battle of Oranges in Ivrea, the gardens of Tuscany, or the story of the…


Book cover of Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Ngoc Minh Ngo Author Of In Bloom: Creating and Living With Flowers

From my list on why everyone loves gardening.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am a photographer of gardens and botanical still-lifes. I have a passion for plants and flowers and love reading about their historical and cultural significance. I am always curious about the meanings that humankind has ascribed to flowers in different cultures and eras. I have written and photographed three books that revolve around my passion for flowers.

Ngoc's book list on why everyone loves gardening

Ngoc Minh Ngo Why did Ngoc love this book?

This is a book that I have read and reread several times. The author is not a garden writer but a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, and Gardens is a unique work in garden literature. Harrison’s essay – erudite, thoughtful, and fascinating – examines the urge to garden throughout history. The book takes you on a journey to all gardens – real and imagined – from the Garden of Eden to the Garden School of Epicurus and the homeless gardens in New York City, to Versailles and the Paradise gardens of Islam. With its wide-ranging topics and cultural references, the book invites repeated readings, especially when I want to think more deeply about what gardening reveals about our human condition.

By Robert Pogue Harrison,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Gardens as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Humans have long turned to gardens - both real and imaginary - for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. With "Gardens", Robert Pogue Harrison graces readers with a thoughtful, wide-ranging examination of the many ways gardens evoke the human condition. Moving from the gardens of ancient philosophers to the gardens of homeless people in contemporary New York, he shows how, again and again, the garden has served as a check against the destruction and losses of history. Alive with the echoes and arguments of Western thought, "Gardens" is a fitting continuation of the intellectual journeys of Harrison's…


Book cover of Plants of Haida Gwaii

Theresa Kishkan Author Of Mnemonic: A Book of Trees

From my list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in a coastal landscape and aspired from childhood to read my way through it by knowing its plants. I once watched a master carver at work on a totem pole at a living museum and could relate the wood curls falling from his adze to the giant cedars growing at the site. As a university student, I worked in a botanical show garden, learning so much about the provenance of plants and what they tell us about geography, history, and beauty. These experiences, in childhood and early adulthood, formed my lifelong interest in ethnobotany, nomenclature, and mythology, explored through the lens of creative work.

Theresa's book list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs

Theresa Kishkan Why did Theresa love this book?

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.

By Nancy J. Turner,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Plants of Haida Gwaii as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.


Book cover of Honey from a Weed: Fasting and Feasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia

Theresa Kishkan Author Of Mnemonic: A Book of Trees

From my list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in a coastal landscape and aspired from childhood to read my way through it by knowing its plants. I once watched a master carver at work on a totem pole at a living museum and could relate the wood curls falling from his adze to the giant cedars growing at the site. As a university student, I worked in a botanical show garden, learning so much about the provenance of plants and what they tell us about geography, history, and beauty. These experiences, in childhood and early adulthood, formed my lifelong interest in ethnobotany, nomenclature, and mythology, explored through the lens of creative work.

Theresa's book list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs

Theresa Kishkan Why did Theresa love 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.

By Patience Gray, Corinna Sargood (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Honey from a Weed as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book is perhaps the jewel in Prospect Book's crown. Within a few months of its first appearance in 1986 it was hailed as a modern classic. Fiona MacCarthy wrote in The Times that, 'the book is a large and grandiose life history, a passionate narrative of extremes of experience.'; Jeremy Round called Patience Gray 'he high priestess of cooking';, whose book pushes the form of the cookery book as far as it can go. Angela Carter remarked that it was less a cookery book that a summing-up of the genre of the late-modern British cookery book. The work has…


Book cover of The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants

Theresa Kishkan Author Of Mnemonic: A Book of Trees

From my list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs.

Why am I passionate about this?

I grew up in a coastal landscape and aspired from childhood to read my way through it by knowing its plants. I once watched a master carver at work on a totem pole at a living museum and could relate the wood curls falling from his adze to the giant cedars growing at the site. As a university student, I worked in a botanical show garden, learning so much about the provenance of plants and what they tell us about geography, history, and beauty. These experiences, in childhood and early adulthood, formed my lifelong interest in ethnobotany, nomenclature, and mythology, explored through the lens of creative work.

Theresa's book list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs

Theresa Kishkan Why did Theresa love this 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.

By Anna Pavord,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Naming of Names as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Searching for Order traces the search for order in the natural world, a search that for hundreds of years occupied some of the most brilliant minds in Europe. Redefining man's relationship with nature was an important feature of the Renaissance. But in a world full of plagues and poisons, there was also a practical need to name and recognise different plants: most medicines were made from plant extracts. Anna Pavord takes us on a thrilling adventure into botanical history, travelling from Athens in the third century BC, through Constantinople, Venice, the medical school at Salerno to the universities of Pisa…


Book cover of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

Laura Pritchett Author Of Three Keys

From my list on delightful books about Mama Earth.

Why am I passionate about this?

My seven novels all celebrate the natural world—while, I hope, telling a good story. Nature has always been my solace and delight. I’ve also had the honor of developing and directing an MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University, one of the few nationwide programs to focus on cutting-edge environmental writing. While I mainly write novels, I’m the author of two nonfiction books and one play and the editor of three environmental anthologies. When not writing or teaching, I can be found sauntering around the West, especially in my home state of Colorado. I love travel and adventuring, and I like looking at birds, stars, clouds, and sea glass. 

Laura's book list on delightful books about Mama Earth

Laura Pritchett Why did Laura love this book?

Memoirs can be delightful, too, although they also have a bad rap for being depressing! This is one of my favorite Earth-based recent nonfiction reads. It focuses on the joys of gardening—even in a small suburban plot—and focuses on being a black gardener in a predominately white town.

The plants she grows are used as a metaphor to discuss cultural diversity, particularly in how we must cultivate diverse and intersectional language to protect our planet. Dungy is also the editor of an anthology entitled Black Nature, which covers decades of poetry by Black writers. 

By Camille T. Dungy,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Soil as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A seminal work that expands how we talk about the natural world and the environment as National Book Critics Circle Criticism finalist Camille T. Dungy diversifies her garden to reflect her heritage.

In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens.

In resistance to the homogenous policies that limited the…


Book cover of A Way to Garden: A Hands-On Primer for Every Season

Mary-Kate Mackey Author Of The Healthy Garden: Simple Steps for a Greener World

From my list on garden books to save the planet.

Why am I passionate about this?

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.

Mary-Kate's book list on garden books to save the planet

Mary-Kate Mackey Why did Mary-Kate love this book?

Many garden books are structured in a classic four-seasons pattern, but this one goes beyond, by delineating the gardening year as steps in the essence of all living beings—from conception in January, adulthood in July and August, to death in December. This clever and thoughtful approach celebrates the fact that we are all woven into the fabric of the natural world. Add to that the author’s lifetime of good gardening experience and advice, and this book shows readers in intimate detail how to work with nature, not against her. 

By Margaret Roach,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Way to Garden as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

For Margaret Roach gardening is more than a hobby, it's a calling. Her unique approach, which she refers to as "horticultural how-to and woo-hoo," is a blend of vital information to memorise (like how to plant a bulb) and intuitive steps gardeners must simply feel and surrender to. For more than twenty years Roach has shared her deep garden knowledge with an appreciative audience, first at Martha Stewart Living and now on her popular website and podcast. Now, with A Way to Garden, she explores how she and her way of gardening have changed over the years. Throughout, she shares…


Book cover of The Gardener's Year
Book cover of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World
Book cover of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

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