Here are 100 books that The Wardian Case fans have personally recommended if you like
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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.
A good book provides me with information, but it must also be entertaining and free of annoying jargon. This one became a bestseller after it appeared back in 1998, with good reason. In fact, I’ve read it three times (a rarity for me) and I always get a chuckle or two. Susan Orlean crafts a fascinating tale about the wonderful subculture of orchid fanciers in Florida. The writing is vivid, the characters she meets are off the wall, and I learned a lot about these weird, sometimes creepy flowers.
The story of orchid thief and obsessive, John Laroche, and the bizarre world of the orchid fanciers of Florida. The world of the orchid hunters, breeders and showmen, their rivalries, vendettas and crimes, smuggling, thefts and worse provide the backdrop to an exploration of one of the byways of human nature, the obsessive world of the collector.
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.
A modest little paperback which is charming because Sacks writes so well about anything and everything. When he wasn’t delving into our grey matter, the famous New York neurologist (who died recently) happened to be an amateur botanist, with a particular passion for ferns. In this book, he visits the Mexican city of Oaxaca, travels the surrounding countryside with a like-minded group and records in a diary his thoughts about the plants and people he encounters. The vignettes are well told, colourful and a delight to read.
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist and also a member of the American Fern Society. This is his spellbinding account of his recent trip with a group of fellow fern enthusiasts to the beautiful, history-steeped province of Oaxaca. A captivating evocation of a place, its people, its plants and its myriad wonders.
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.
Devout Christian Garrison Keillor jokes in the foreword to this book that reading it gave him a jolt because Musselman insists that Eve couldn’t possibly have given an apple to Adam. “Apples didn’t grow in the Middle East back then. It was more likely an apricot,” claims Musselman, a celebrated botanist based at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. True or not, he’s assembled years of research in the Holy Land into a thought-provoking book that’s both a reference guide and very readable. With some good photographs.
This book celebrates the plants of the Old Testament, New Testament, and Quran. From acacia, the wood of the tabernacle, to wormwood, whose bitter leaves, as absinthe, flavor alcoholic drinks, 81 chapters cover the more than 100 plants in the holy texts that have true botanical counterparts. Fascinating stories of the fruits, grains, grasses, trees, flowers, and fragrances include botanical characteristics, habitat, uses, and literary context. Richly illustrated with extensive color, this delightful ecumenical botany offers the welcome tonic of a deep look into an enduring, shared natural heritage.
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.
Another engrossing book that I’ve read several times, by a professor of English at the University of Louisville. Ridley relates the amazing true – but little known – story of Jeanne Baret, the first woman to sail around the world. She did it disguised as a man in order to accompany her lover, a botanist called Philibert Commerson on a plant collecting expedition back in the 18th century. When they got to Brazil, Baret discovered the vine bougainvillea, which the pair named after the expedition leader, Count de Bougainville (with Commerson, of course, taking all the credit) and she endured incredible hardships keeping her identity secret from the male crew during the arduous voyage. Dried specimens of her finds can still be seen today at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.
The year was 1765. Eminent botanist Philibert Commerson had just been appointed to a grand new expedition: the first French circumnavigation of the world. As the ships’ official naturalist, Commerson would seek out resources—medicines, spices, timber, food—that could give the French an edge in the ever-accelerating race for empire.
Jeanne Baret, Commerson’s young mistress and collaborator, was desperate not to be left behind. She disguised herself as a teenage boy and signed on as his assistant. The journey made the twenty-six-year-old, known to her shipmates as “Jean” rather than “Jeanne,” the first woman to ever sail around the globe. Yet…
I have studied the intersection of human and natural history as an enthusiast, newspaper columnist, teacher, museum curator, and author. I strongly believe in the value of local knowledge, which has led me to work with and learn from several Plateau tribal communities. I use primary documents, including field journals, maps, artwork, oral histories, and the landscape itself as my building blocks. If I can arrive at a confluence of rivers on the same day of the year as some early white visitors and search for the living things that they wrote about during their stay, then I have something that I can compare directly with tribal oral histories.
When I became interested in the relationship between Plateau tribal peoples and their cultural plants, everyone I spoke with directed me to a series of remarkable papers by British Columbia ethnobotanist Nancy Turner. One look at the photographs of elders who grace the introduction to each volume reinforces their individual knowledge and respect for the place where they have lived for untold generations. Turner’s work in southeastern B.C. eastern Washington, north Idaho, and western Montana have been distilled here into a handy field guide filled with both beautiful photographs and timeless information.
Nancy Turner describes more than 150 plants traditionally harvested and eaten by First Peoples east of the Coast Mountains in British Columbia and northern Washington. Each description includes information on where to find the plant and a discussion on traditional methods of harvesting and preparation.
I’ve always been fascinated by nature, even from a young age. My parents would set up easels for my sister and me to paint outdoors, and I haven’t stopped drawing since. I tend to focus on flora and fauna, making illustrations with subdued colors and intricate details. I love to create illustrations for books, and occasionally, I’ll write them, too. Often reflective of history, mythology, and folklore, my work captures an old-world feeling and a love of nature. In my spare time, you can find me in my garden or out walking my dog, Molly.
If you want a big book of florals, look no further than Botanicum. Everything from algae to orchids is covered in this illustrated encyclopedia, featuring Katie Scott’s artwork paired with Professor Kathy Willis’ writing. I’m drawn to the fine lines in Scott’s work, with her illustrations of parasitic and carnivorous plants being my absolute favorite pages. Fascinating for both children and adults, I’d highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys getting lost in the details of fantastic florals.
The 2016 offering from Big Picture Press's Welcome to the Museum series, Botanicum is a stunningly curated guide to plant life. With artwork from Katie Scott of Animalium fame, Botanicum gives readers the experience of a fascinating exhibition from the pages of a beautiful book.
From perennials to bulbs to tropical exotica, Botanicum is a wonderful feast of botanical knowledge complete with superb cross sections of how plants work.
I’m an herbalist, writer, and founder of Botanical Culture, a new compendium of plants and the people who cultivate them. I love helping people find the best herbs to support their health and well-being, whether by consulting, research and writing, or teaching workshops. After training at an herbalism school and more than a decade of growing and foraging, I’m still wonderstruck every time I walk into a garden or browse an apothecary. Great books about herbs inspire the same feeling of reverence for our oldest healing traditions and put the power of nature within reach.
Delving into the most significant herbs among Indigenous peoples of North America, Dr. Salmón revels in the stories that stitch plants into the memory of a culture. The result is an engaging repertoire of 80 beloved and well-illustrated herbs. Dr. Salmón, an ethnobotanist and professor, has marinated each entry in this beautiful book in a lifetime of learning from people who have profound knowledge of their homelands. Its title is inspired by his own tribe, the Rarámuri (Tarahumara) of the Mexican Sierra Madres, whose concept of iwígarareflects the understanding that all of life is interconnected and “shares the same breath.” I love the spirit of this book with its focus on narrative and come-sit-by-the-fire storytelling. If you’re hungry for the action and poetry of a good story heaped onto a plate of botanical legend and lore, this book is for you.
Iwigara, when translated, means the kinship of plants and people. And that is exactly what Enrique Salmon explores in this important book. Iwigara shares culturally specific information about 80 plants, addressing their historical and modern-day uses as medicine, food, spices, and more. Iwigara includes plants entries derived from many different American Indian tribes and seven geographic regions across the United States. Each plant entry includes the names commonly used by different tribes, a colour photograph, a short description, rich details about how the plant is used, and tips on identification and ethical harvest. Traditional stories and myths, along with images…
For fifteen years now, I have been exploring the seemingly strange connection between plants and philosophy. The unexpected twists and turns of this theme have taken me to forests and gardens, to collaborations with plant artists and plant scientists, to ancient thought and twenty-first-century experimental design. Once you get over the initial surprise (What can philosophy tell us about plants?), you will be in for the exhilarating ride that is vegetal philosophy, finding plant heritage in human thought, politics, and society; witnessing traditional hierarchies and systems of classification crumble into dust; and discovering the amazing capacities of plants that testify to one important insight—plants are smarter than you think!
Monica Gagliano gives us a enchanting peek at the complexities, consciousness, and subjectivity of plants, as well as at her own story as a woman scientist, who is one of the pioneers in the field of plant intelligence. Weaving together her biography with the life of plants in a creative mix of “phytobiography,” the author shows how working “on” plants is also always working “with” them. We collaborate and communicate, Gagliano suggests, across species and biological kingdom boundaries, and it is on this unknown terrain that her scientific discoveries of plant learning or plant bioacoustics are made. Although Gagliano is not a philosopher by training, the account she offers in Thus Spoke the Plant opens new and exciting vistas in the philosophy of plants.
An accessible and compelling story of a scientist's discovery of plant communication and how it influenced her research and changed her life.
In this "phytobiography"--a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant--research scientist Monica Gagliano reveals the dynamic role plants play in genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people--beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants…
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…
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.
Blogger and podcaster Matt Candeias used to think plants were boring. Then, in college, he got a summer job in habitat restoration at an old quarry, and he fell in love.
He learned about the strange ways plants have sex, how they conquer new territories, and what animals they prefer to eat. Most of all, they fight for survival. It’s not exactly war, but there is never enough water, nutrients, space, and light, and there are always predators. Plants meet their challenges in surprising, wonderful ways.
So go outside, he says, and get to know your local plants like you know your friends.
"Matt Candeias succeeds in evoking the wonder of plants with wit and wisdom." James T. Costa, PhD, executive director, Highlands Biological Station and author of Darwin's Backyard
#1 New Release in Nature & Ecology, Plants, Botany, Horticulture, Trees, Biological Sciences, and Nature Writing & Essays
In his debut book, internationally-recognized blogger and podcaster Matt Candeias celebrates the nature of plants and the extraordinary world of plant organisms.
A botanist's defense. Since his early days of plant restoration, this amateur plant scientist has been enchanted with flora and the greater environmental ecology…
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