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Book Lovers Day is Aug. 9. To celebrate, we asked our co-workers and greenhouse staff for their favorite plant book recommendations. The results cover everything from creating a raised bed garden to using plants as herbal remedies.
If you’re looking for a good beach read, here are seven of our favorite plant and gardening books and why we love them.
Did we miss any of your favorite books about plants? Tell us in the comments. Until then, here are seven books about plants that we’d like to highlight.
In A Garden Can Be Anywhere, author Lauri Kranz walks aspiring gardeners through how to create a plentiful edible garden outdoors, no matter the space you’re working with. One of our favorite parts about this book is her instruction for building and maintaining raised bed gardens.
Wild Remedies is a comprehensive guide to foraging and crafting herbal remedies. Expert herbalists Rosalee de la Forêt and Emily Han walk readers through 75 recipes for how to use wild plants and herbs for food and DIY remedies.
The illustrated guide, complete with accompanying photography will help aspiring foragers properly identify plants and harvest the plant medicine that is growing in your own backyard or neighborhood.
Wicked Plants is a delightfully interesting tome that includes a multitude of short stories about deadly plants throughout history. Amy Stewart provides readers with “an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend,” including exploding shrubs, a tree that sheds poison daggers and more.
This is Your Mind on Plants is a fantastic read about mankind’s attraction to psychoactive plants. Michael Pollan dives into three “drug” plants — opium, caffeine and mescaline — and discusses the way we think about these plants and how we use them. For example, he explores why we consider tea made with tea leaves OK, but making tea with the seed head of opium poppy is a federal crime.
In The Accidental Botanist, author Robbie Honey travels the world looking for unique plants and dissecting them on the spot. At the very least, this is a pretty picture book of flowers broken down into their basic parts. Honey examines 100 types of plants and flowers and breaks them down into chapters based on color, and he includes information on where the plant was found, how it can be used and other interesting facts.
In Orchid Fever, author Eric Hansen delves into the crazy world of orchid lovers — from wild orchids to cultivated varieties. Did you know that there is an orchid in South America that can grow to weigh a half-ton? Neither did we! As orchid lovers ourselves, this book really resonated with us.
In Michael Pollan’s second book on our list, The Botany of Desire explores four key plants (apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes) and how they have changed and been changed by human cultures. He describes how humans have benefited from these crops and how they have benefited from our usage of them in return.
Which book will you choose to cuddle up with on Book Lovers Day? Do you have a plant book recommendation we could add to our reading lists? Let us know in the comments!
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