New birders quickly discover: To find birds, find plants. As the foundation of healthy ecosystems, plants provide birds with food and shelter and support myriad other organisms in complicated webs of connection. Learning about these relationships and affinities can be a boon if you hope to see a particular species in the field or draw birds to your home by growing native plants suited to your area.
But the kingdom Plantae is a universe unto itself, well worth exploring for its own sake. Whether you’re looking for mind-boggling botanical facts, beautiful photographs and illustrations, or thoughtful reflections on our own species’s enthusiastic entanglement with plants, these seven books published in 2024 are a great place to start (or give as gifts).
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The beloved author of Braiding Sweetgrass is back with a new exploration of the lessons to be learned from plants. Kimmerer’s focus in this slim but stirring volume is the economic system that orders our society and—all too often, she laments—constrains our lives while depleting the earth. As a botanist and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she finds inspiration and an alternative model in the plants around her. Particularly instructive is the serviceberry (think blueberry with a dash of rosewater, she says), which with its many ecological partners, including the Cedar Waxwing that graces the book’s cover, offers a lesson we ignore at our peril: All flourishing is mutual. Moving gracefully between science, economic theory, Indigenous teachings, and stories about her generous and creative neighbors, Kimmerer urges readers to look for ways to reorient our communities toward reciprocity, toward gifts. It is not a rhetorical question when she asks: “What if our metrics for well-being included birdsong?”
The Serviceberry, by Robin Wall Kimmerer, 128 pages, $20.00. Available here from Simon & Schuster.
The Light Eaters by Zoë Schlanger
From the outside, academic science can look like a staid and steady affair. But as Schlanger’s fascinating book attests, plant science could be, maybe, on the cusp of a revolution. At issue is whether plants’ remarkable capabilities, from crops that chemically summon the predators of leaf-munching insects to a South American vine that can physically mimic other plants by mysterious means, constitute behavior—or even intelligence. Schlanger, who initially turned to the topic as a distraction from her relentlessly dispiriting work as a climate journalist (before quitting to obsess about plants full-time), introduces the reader to an engaging cast of boundary-pushing botanists and follows her curiosity to laboratories, jungles, and even a cave. Filled with eye-popping examples of vegetal feats and buoyed by Schlanger’s earnest infatuation, The Light Eaters may not arrive at an indisputable conclusion—the debate continues, after all—but you will likely never look at your houseplants the same way.
The Light Eaters, by Zoë Schlanger, 304 pages, $29.99. Available here from HarperCollins.
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing
Many birders have a spark bird, but writer and critic (and onetime herbalist) Olivia Laing has a spark plant: the fragrant pink Daphne, “the first plant I’d fallen in love with, the first botanical name I’d learned as a child.” The flower reappeared in her life in the grand but neglected gardens of an English country house in Suffolk, which Laing threw herself into restoring amid the COVID-19 pandemic, even as she questioned the pursuit. Picture a formal garden and you likely imagine closed gates and exotic varietals. Can a garden ever be more than a space of exclusion and artifice? Laing sets out for the answer and brings the reader along, through lush descriptions of the plants she nurtures (and the wildlife they attract) and incisive surveys of gardening in history, art, and her own life, full of pitfalls and possibility. With equal enthusiasm for ecology and Paradise Lost, Laing makes a compelling case for gardens as a site of both creativity and connection, where we can collaborate with the more-than-human world and get our hands dirty shaping better futures.
The Garden Against Time, by Olivia Laing, 336 pages, $27.99. Available here from Bookshop.org.
Birds and Flowers by Jeff Ollerton
Endearingly dedicated to the world’s birders and plant enthusiasts (“may your binoculars never fog up, may you never lose your hand lens”), Jeff Ollerton’s Birds and Flowers could serve as a classroom text with its density of information and extensive bibliography. And yet the book is a highly approachable and entertaining narration of the complicated, coevolving relationship between, yes, birds and blooms. Told largely in first-person and drawing on his decades of field work as an ecologist in far-flung destinations, Ollerton’s scope is vast in both time (hundreds of millions of years!) and space (the whole planet!), but the threads are easy to follow and the details absorbing. Come for the bounty of fun facts (did you know some warblers and woodpeckers pollinate flowers?) and leave with a renewed appreciation of Earth’s biodiversity—and of the passionate dedication of scientists and conservationists to its study and protection.
Birds and Flowers, by Jeff Ollerton, 336 pages, $26.00. Available here from Pelagic.
What the Bees See by Craig P. Burrows
In this gorgeous, image-driven book, photographer Craig P. Burrows uses a technique that captures the “natural fluorescence,” or reflected ultraviolet light, of plants to evoke how pollinators may see them, in particular bees. (Though it’s not a focus of the book, birds, too, can see ultraviolet light invisible to humans). While he acknowledges it’s a speculative and incomplete approach—there’s no accounting for bees’ compound eyes, for instance—the effect is mesmerizing: pollen sparkles, stems and petals acquire psychedelic neons and alien pastels, and everything appears to glow, as if lit from within. The eerie and stunning photographs are undeniably the main draw, but the book also contains short chapters, diagrams, and infographics about the ecology of pollination, bee anatomy, the uses and cultural significance of honey, and conservation threats facing insects and the plants they both rely on and support. Really, though, the photographs deserve the attention. You won’t forget them.
What the Bees See, by Craig P. Burrows, 192 pages, $40.00. Available here from Chronicle Books.
The Tree Collectors by Amy Stewart
In 50 short profiles—or, as the subtitle calls them, “tales of arboreal obsession”—Stewart has curated a compendium of remarkable lives, varied in their expertises and experiences, but united in their devotion to trees. Stewart’s “collectors” include scientists and archivists, a bonsai grower and a poet, and many less easily categorized enthusiasts. Some have made caring for and collecting trees their career, while others are true amateurs in the original sense: They do it out of love. Serious birders might relate to the subjects, some of whom dryly report their friends and families have “long since grown tired of tree talk.” What stands out, though, is the joy and deep satisfaction the collectors take in their pursuits—evident in the cheerfully illustrated portraits that accompany their profiles, but most of all in their own words. With their stories, Stewart has created her own collection, and it shines.
The Tree Collectors, by Amy Stewart, 336 pages, $32.00. Available here from Random House.
The Hidden Life of Trees: A Graphic Adaptation by Peter Wohlleben and Fred Bernard, illustrated by Benjamin Flao
German forest manager Wohllenben’s account of the unseen connections and capabilities of forests, The Hidden Life of Trees, caused an immediate buzz on its publication in 2015 and translation into English the following year. Now the book has been given new life with a graphic adaptation by Fred Bernard and illustrator Benjamin Flao. It’s a beautiful, gift-worthy volume that covers the entirety of Wohllenben’s book, interweaving tree science with personal reflections, loosely organized into a year of “seasons.” While in recent years some botanists have pushed back against starry-eyed claims of a “wood wide web” of fungi-facilitated root communication networks, which Wohllenben discusses in the book, the bulk of his observations are grounded in his decades of first-hand experience as a forester. His thoughtful musings and conclusions, enlivened by Flao’s intricate and energetic illustrations, are a pleasure to explore. You may find yourself running for the nearest forest.
The Hidden Life of Trees: A Graphic Adaptation, by Peter Wohllenben and Fred Bernard, illustrated by Benjamin Flao, 240 pages, $35.00. Available here from Bookshop.org.
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