100 Books Like Flora Poetica

I have a love of fields having grown up on a farm in the west of Ireland and now living on a hillside in Co. Wicklow.

The boundaried space of a field is like a poem in how it restricts and frees, hides and reveals, protects and exposes the life within. This anthology, first published in 1998, is testimony to what fields have meant and still mean to us. Every page reveals a moving poem by one of my favourite poets; Gillian Clarke, John Clare, Thomas Hardy, Denise Levertov, Seamus Heaney, Patrick Kavanagh, Alice Oswald.

The anthology is produced by Common Ground, a Devon-based charity that seeks to reconnect people with nature and inspire communities to become responsible for their local environment.  

Soon after it was published sixteen years ago my wife gave me a gift of Earth Shattering. I’ve valued this anthology ever since as an essential guide to ecopoetry.

The selection of poets includes writers of the past as well as leading contemporary poets from around the world. In particular the wilderness poetry of ancient China was a revelation to me as was the modern Native American poetry.

The editor Neil Astley’s summary of the key issues debated within ecocriticism is excellent and I often return to the clarity of his definition: “eco poetry goes beyond traditional nature poetry to take on distinctly contemporary issues, recognising the interdependence of all life on earth, the wildness and otherness of nature, and the irresponsibility of our attempts to tame and plunder nature.” 

By showcasing the rich tradition of queer poets whose writing is inspired by nature, Queer Nature opens up the nature poetry genre.

It is the book I needed twenty years ago when I began writing poetry. In my search for queer role models I was happy to find Mary Oliver, Kay Ryan, and Elizabeth Bishop but little did I know how many others were hiding in plain sight. This expansive anthology presents up to 200 more poets from 150 years ago to the present day, with a moving introduction by editor Michael Walsh.

Funny, sad, complex, and direct; the poems explore exclusion and alienation as well as love and belonging. Above all else this anthology confirms that poetry is as boundless as nature and that together they belong to everyone.

This is an exciting and important poetry anthology.

Spanning the history of black poetry in America, the editor Camille T. Dungy has collected one hundred and eighty poems by ninety-three poets. Her introduction radically enlarges the realm of eco-poetry as she considers the exclusion of African-American poets from the nature poetry genre while also exploring the complexity of their relationship with the land that witnessed or abetted centuries of racist subjugation.

Thought-provoking essays by Alice Walker, Marilyn Nelson, and others, introduce each of the ten sections in which I found a treasure trove of poets I’ve long admired, such as Rita Dove and Ross Gay, and poets I’ve never come across before, such as Kamilah Aisha Moon.

I learned about botanical nomenclature as a 19-year-old, and it opened a world to me, a place where plants told me something about their origins and their function. This book gives me the background to the long history of naming.

Those who gathered plants, who learned their uses and needed to be accurate, also required a system that would allow them to write about their knowledge in a way that allowed others to use it and share it. From Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus in 4th century BE Athens to Islamic scholars to the 18th-century medical professor Carl Linnaeus, Anna Pavord immerses us in the search for meaning and sense in the world of plants.

It isn’t, not at all. It’s history at its best, populated by apothecaries, artists, botanists and scholars. And the illustrations are sublime.

If you want a big book of florals, look no further than Botanicum. Everything from algae to orchids is covered in this illustrated encyclopedia, featuring Katie Scott’s artwork paired with Professor Kathy Willis’ writing. I’m drawn to the fine lines in Scott’s work, with her illustrations of parasitic and carnivorous plants being my absolute favorite pages. Fascinating for both children and adults, I’d highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys getting lost in the details of fantastic florals.

Blogger and podcaster Matt Candeias used to think plants were boring. Then, in college, he got a summer job in habitat restoration at an old quarry, and he fell in love.

He learned about the strange ways plants have sex, how they conquer new territories, and what animals they prefer to eat. Most of all, they fight for survival. It’s not exactly war, but there is never enough water, nutrients, space, and light, and there are always predators. Plants meet their challenges in surprising, wonderful ways.

So go outside, he says, and get to know your local plants like you know your friends.

This gorgeous book by microbiologist Dr. Beronda L. Montgomery is as beautiful to read as it is to hold—in your hands, in your heart. We can’t stop thinking about Montgomery’s key lesson: if you have a plant that is struggling, you figure out what environmental changes it needs to thrive—more or less water or sunlight, better soil. When people fail to flourish, we’re quick to blame the individual. As an African American woman, Montgomery makes us think about society and how we approach problems (do we compete or do we build a collaborative effort for a holistic solution?). Humans have much to discover from our photosynthesizing world: how plants learn—from their own kin, their friends, and their foes—and Montgomery helps us to understand the nature (literally) of teaching and learning.

This book is fairly new, by an Aussie environmental historian. I got hooked from the first page because, once again, it’s well written and I learned stuff about plants that I didn’t know already. The Wardian Case was a kind of travelling greenhouse designed by an English amateur naturalist named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in Victorian times. His simple invention made it possible to send plants around the world on the decks of sailing ships -and resulted in the huge array of species for sale in garden centres today. Beautiful plants that we now take for granted  -like roses, rhododendrons, magnolias, wisteria, countless ferns, and more—travelled thousands of miles from their countries of origin in these unpretentious but surprisingly efficient boxes. A great story, with good photos.

Monica Gagliano gives us a enchanting peek at the complexities, consciousness, and subjectivity of plants, as well as at her own story as a woman scientist, who is one of the pioneers in the field of plant intelligence. Weaving together her biography with the life of plants in a creative mix of “phytobiography,” the author shows how working “on” plants is also always working “with” them. We collaborate and communicate, Gagliano suggests, across species and biological kingdom boundaries, and it is on this unknown terrain that her scientific discoveries of plant learning or plant bioacoustics are made. Although Gagliano is not a philosopher by training, the account she offers in Thus Spoke the Plant opens new and exciting vistas in the philosophy of plants.