Just the tonic, by Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt 2019. Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. What is: carbonated water, citric acid, sodium citrate, natural quinine, and aspartame? That is the declared list of ingredients in a can...
Category - Reviews
Nigel Chaffey
Tales of tea, still stirring emotions in 2020
Tea leaves might not predict the future, but they have a powerful connection to our past.
How do plants work?
Beauty is more than skin deep in this book explaining how plants function.
Mankind and the magnificent mulberry; a plants-and-people tale
Mulberry by Peter Coles 2019. Reaktion Books Ltd. Arguably, the only thing you need to know about Mulberry by Peter Coles is that it’s a title in Reaktion Books’ Botanical series. Anyone who’s read my book appraisals...
The Garden Jungle by Dave Goulson
(or Gardening to Save the Planet) On my every growing to-do list is create a wildlife-friendly garden, should I ever move house and have a garden. That’s not happening any time soon, but if you do have a garden...
Alun Salt
When plants go to war!
Plants go to war: A botanical history of World War II by Judith Sumner, 2019. McFarland & Co. Lest there be any doubt at the outset, this blog item is an appraisal of a book that looks at the role of plants in...
What real people think about plants
Vickery’s Folk Flora: An A-Z of the Folklore and Uses of British and Irish Plants by Roy Vickery, 2019. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. For the past several weeks I’ve been tackling Rebecca Armstrong’s Vergil’s Green...
Ancient botany for the 21st century
Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine by Rebecca Armstrong, 2019. Oxford University Press. When I first heard about Vergil’s Green Thoughts by Rebecca Armstrong, I was eager to obtain a...
The extraordinary story of an ‘ordinary’ fruit…
The Extraordinary Story of the Apple by Barrie E. Juniper and David J. Mabberley 2019. Kew Publishing. Having recently read Robert Spengler’s Fruits from the sands (and Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire several years...
