My favourite books on plants 📚

When my passion for books meets my passion for plants

Dec 07, 2022

I love reading (and books) even more than I love houseplants. The best thing is when the two passions meet: in books about (house)plants. I’ve compiled a short list on some of my favourite books on plants—starting with novels.

As I was compiling this list, I realised that a lot of these novels are historical. There’s something about the wonder that the characters feel about the first sight of a plant that is perhaps lost in much contemporary fiction—or maybe these novels just satisfy my desire to escape the twenty-first century at times.

Novels about plants and plant collectors

The book links are mostly affiliate Bookshop.org links.

River of Smoke, Amitav Ghosh

I loved the expansiveness of this novel (and the trilogy it’s part of). It introduced me for me the first time to how plants were collected—primarily in China and India—and then shipped to Britain using all kinds of new inventions. Along with it being a novel of Empire and colonialism, it also shows ecological imperialism in practice: both through the removal of plants, as well as the large-scale introduction of plants (especially opium) for the benefit of the colonisers.

Plants were not of course an uncommon sight on sailships: most carried a few, either for nutrition, or decoration, or merely because a touch of green was always a welcome sight on the high seas. But the Redruth’s stock of flora extended far beyond the usual half-dozen pots: her decks were stacked also with a large number of ‘Wardian cases’. These were a new invention: glass-fronted boxes with adjustable sides, they were, in effect, miniature greenhouses. They have revolutionized the business of transporting plants across the seas, making it much easier and safer.

Earthly Joys, Philippa Gregory

This novel is the most traditional historical novel of the list, but I was amazed by the depth of research that has gone into this novel about a seventeenth-century gardener who ends up growing all kinds of plants amidst political turmoil.

He had a belief, as yet unexpressed, almost unformed, that there was something dead and hard about a garden of stone paths edged with box enclosing beds of gravel.

The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert

This novel surprised me. I’d carefully skirted the Eat, Pray, Love-hype, and based on all my prejudices around that book, was amazed when I read The Signature of All Things. Another historical novel, like Ghosh’s, it follows a young woman who ends up becoming an important botanist in her own time—especially when it comes to the study of moss. I love mosses (and can’t resist touching them), so I delighted in the wonder the main character feels.

Mosses were typically defined by what they lacked, not by what they were, and, indeed, they lacked much. Mosses bore no fruit. Mosses had no roots. Mosses could grow no more than a few inches tall, for they contained no internal cellular skeleton with which to support themselves. Mosses could not transport water within their bodies. Mosses did not even engage in sex. (Or at least they did not engage in sex in any obvious manner, unlike lilies or apple blossoms—or any other flower, in fact—with their overt displays of male and female organs.) Mosses kept their propagation a mystery to the naked human eye. For that reason, they were also known by the evocative name Cryptogamae—“hidden marriage.”

Everything the Light Touches, Janice Pariat

This novel essentially inspired this list. It combines four different characters, storylines and eras, from the late eighteenth-century to today. The theme of wonder is big in this novel too—the wonder of how plants grow and develop, how resilient they are and how, frankly, magical. It ties in with a deep ecological concern that the characters share.

Rather, we learn from plants a way of living thinking . . . With my gentian, it struck me how, even in its apparent stillness, it was a dynamically sensitive being, forming and changing itself through dialogue with whatever conditions it met in the world . . . air, moisture, light . . .

There is nothing more enlivening than being entangled in this manner with another living being. It never ceases to surprise him, that however jaded he might be—of life, of court, of poetry, even—the presence of a plant, in the woods, on a windowsill, renews him endlessly.

Non-fiction books about (house)plants

The houseplant books I consult most frequently are Plantopedia and Plant Society as well as the books by the Dutch writer Iris van Vliet, also known as Mama Botanica.

For an in-depth historical exploration of ‘discovery’, collaboration and ecological imperialism I loved Alexandra Wulf’s The Brother Gardeners, which is also really readable.

Expanding beyond houseplants, these are three of my favourite books on gardening and living with plants and the seasons:

Seed to Dust by Marc Hamer, which follows an unconventional gardener throughout the year. I loved dipping into this book.
I recognised a lot from my own life in Alice Vincent’s Rootbound, especially when it comes to learning to grow plants and learning to see an appreciate them. I can’t wait for her new book (Why Women Grow) to appear next year!
I just treated myself to Planting the Oudolf Gardens as I’m getting ready to make plans for the small, sad lawn in our front garden. I’m dreaming of an expanse of wild-looking, native plants fuelled by the pictures in this book.