52 Books Like The Illustrated Herbiary

This book is by one of my favourite nature writers of all time, Robert Macfarlane. It’s a picture book that is for humans of all ages, truly. His poetry makes for a beautiful read aloud, the illustrations by Jackie Morris are stunning and the size of it makes for an immersive experience. I absolutely loved reading it with my kids when they were a little younger and we all piled into my bed. I also believe that it works… the poems are ‘spells’ designed to bring certain words back into use since they were cut from the Junior Oxford English Dictionary. Words like acorn… kingfisher, and otter…. Please read and share this book!

It’s always a joy to find a kindred spirit with a love for flora and fauna, and fellow author/illustrator Katie Daisy is just that. Her beautiful, painterly style, combined with quotes, guides, and poems, makes How to Be a Moonflower a truly fantastic collection. One may not associate the nighttime with lush florals, but plenty of flowers (as well as animals!) come alive after the sun sets. This book is a gem, bursting with inspiration and magic. 

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.

Dena Seiferling’s The Language of Flowers tells the story of Beatrice the bumblebee learning the language of flowers through the meadows she roams. As a fan of subdued colors, Seiferling’s illustration style drew me in, with soft lines and hidden faces within all of the featured blooms. The last two pages are an illustrated list of floral meanings, fantastic for children wanting to learn more about floriography, of which I am (very obviously) a fan!

Plants are our companions through life. We grow, pick and eat some of them, but how much do we really value them? Our ancestors had an intimate knowledge and understanding of the power of plants and were aware of which were helpful and which caused harm. They wrapped comfrey leaves around the damaged legs of animals, believed that fairies sheltered from the rain beneath ragwort plants, cured childhood hernias with the aid of ash saplings, and recognized the benefits of rosehips long before science could analyse their nutrients.

Hatfield’s Herbal follows the tradition of so many other excellent herbals, weaving botany, plant magic, medicine, and folklore into an engrossing mixture that always keeps me reading long after I found what I was originally looking for. Read a good herbal and you’ll never look at a so-called weed in the same way again.

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.

When I became interested in the relationship between Plateau tribal peoples and their cultural plants, everyone I spoke with directed me to a series of remarkable papers by British Columbia ethnobotanist Nancy Turner. One look at the photographs of elders who grace the introduction to each volume reinforces their individual knowledge and respect for the place where they have lived for untold generations. Turner’s work in southeastern B.C. eastern Washington, north Idaho, and western Montana have been distilled here into a handy field guide filled with both beautiful photographs and timeless information. 

My favorite part of the book was the world-building. The setting was a joy to explore, with lush, green cities, clean technology, forests, people living in small communities and relying on barter, and the whole solarpunk aesthetic.

The understanding of morality in this world is largely based on people’s interactions with nature and animals. Those who don’t treat the world with the respect it deserves have to face dire consequences from the Order of the Vengeful Wild, which was an interesting aspect of the book. The story itself was not bad, but didn’t make such an impression on me as the world it was set in.

I’ve been studying the world of plants since first pursuing graduate degrees in the 1980’s. So, one might surmise that I know quite a lot about how plants function and respond to their environment. Reading through this book, I was fascinated to learn how much I didn’t previously know about these amazingly diverse and complex organisms. Some readers may recall an earlier tome titled The Secret Life of Plants.

In the first chapter of this book, author Schlanger dismisses that once-popular work as “a mix of real science, flimsy experiments, and unscientific projection.” She then goes on to interview various biologists, botanists, and physiologists who collectively are conducting mind-bending research on plant intelligence. While this term may make some folks squirm, the scientists she interviews employ such robust methods that all but the most cynical readers will come away understanding that there are many types of intelligence in this… show more.

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.