I am looking for suggestions for a book that is fiction, but plot involves real plants a great deal. Maybe something that requires prior knowledge of plants, as I am a horticulturist irl. I want to learn something but be immersed in a story at the same time.
I recently read The Lost Apothecary and have Forest Euphoria, The Enchanted Greenhouse and The Verdant Cage on my shelf waiting to be read. Thanks for any help!
by gingerbread_bitch
12 Comments
The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart by Holly Ringland! Most of it takes place on a flower farm. Wonderful book, and the miniseries Amazon made of it is pretty good, too.
The Overstory.
From Amazon:
“The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period.” ―Ann Patchett
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of―and paean to―the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours―vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock
The Overstory
The Tree Doctor
GreenwoodÂ
Damnation SpringÂ
The Golden Spruce is another great read.
From Amazon:
A tale of obsession so fierce that a man kills the thing he loves most: The only giant golden spruce on earth.
As vividly as Jon Krakauer put readers on Everest, John Vaillant takes us into the heart of North America’s last great forest, where trees grow to eighteen feet in diameter, sunlight never touches the ground, and the chainsaws are always at work.
When a shattered kayak and camping gear are found on an uninhabited island, they reignite a mystery surrounding a shocking act of protest. Five months earlier, logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin had plunged naked into a river in British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, towing a chainsaw. When his night’s work was done, a unique Sitka spruce, 165 feet tall and covered with luminous golden needles, teetered on its stump. Two days later it fell.
The tree, a fascinating puzzle to scientists, was sacred to the Haida, a fierce seafaring tribe based in the Queen Charlottes. Vaillant recounts the bloody history of the Haida and the early fur trade, and provides harrowing details of the logging industry, whose omnivorous violence would claim both Hadwin and the golden spruce.
Semiotics, if you’re into science fiction.
I did not enjoy it, but Wild Dark Shore might fit the plant theme for the seed vault?Â
The light eaters by Zoe Schlanger
Elizabeth Gilbert, *The Signature of All Things*. The protagonist is a 19th century female botanist studying moss.
Easter Island by Jennifer Vanderbes
The Botanist’s Assistant by Peggy Townsend
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
Over the course of one humid summer, as the urge to procreate overtakes a green and profligate countryside, these characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they necessarily share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the final, urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.