WERE it not for the massive global movement of plants, your garden would look seriously dull and your supermarket depleted. In The Plant Hunters, Carolyn Fry sketches out humankind’s enduring hunger for botanical riches. She steps back 3500 years to Ancient Egypt, then visits different parts of the globe and celebrates the contributions of important personalities like Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks. This journey is told through a series of lavishly illustrated two-page spreads, each distilling an episode in the history of plant collecting down to its most engaging details. Fry even acknowledges the flip-side of all this activity: how an innocuous species in its native setting can quickly turn invader in exotic surroundings.
The Plant Hunters, published this year with the , to celebrate their 250th anniversary, is full of fun facts, intriguing asides and removable reproductions of important maps, historic texts and delightful engravings. If teenagers had coffee tables, this would probably be on them.
See some of Kew’s strangest plants in our gallery
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Andre Deutsch