Join our community partner Longwood Gardens for Community Read—a program designed to encourage reading for pleasure and start a conversation.
The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors
By David George Haskell
Journey with David Haskell as he repeatedly visits a dozen trees in cities from Manhattan to Jerusalem, forests (Amazonian, North American, and boreal) and areas on the front lines of environmental change, including eroding coastlines, burned mountainsides, and war zones. In each place he shows how human history, ecology, and well-being are intimately intertwined with the lives of trees.
Scientific, lyrical, and contemplative, The Songs of Trees reveals the biological connections that underpin all life. In a world beset by barriers, Haskell reminds us that life’s substance and beauty emerge from relationship and interdependence.
Visit our Community Read StoryMap to explore the many connections between the trees Haskell visits in his book and Longwood’s trees.
We Planted a Tree
By Diane Muldrow
Illustrated by Bob Staake
In this poetic picture book with environmental themes and illustrated by award-winning artist Bob Staake, two young families in two very different parts of the world each plant a tree.
As the trees flourish, so do the families . . . while trees all over the world help clean the air, enrich the soil, and give fruit and shade.
With a nod to Kenya’s successful Green Belt Movement, Muldrow’s elegant text celebrates the life and hope that every tree—from Paris to Brooklyn to Tokyo—brings to our planet.
You can place this title on hold or read it at the Brantwood Park Story Trail.
More programs are available on the Longwood Community Read events calendar.
More Books for Adults
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The Arbornaut
Welcome to the eighth continent!
As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn’t monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees.
Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world’s foremost arbornauts, known as the “real-life Lorax.” She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world.
With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Lowman’s irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia’s rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland’s Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia’s last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist. She offers hope, specific plans, and recommendations for action; despite devastation across the world, through trees, we can still make an immediate and lasting impact against climate change.
A blend of memoir and fieldwork account, The Arbornaut gives us the chance to live among scientists and travel the world—even in a hot-air balloon! It is the engrossing, uplifting story of a nerdy tree climber—the only girl at the science fair—who becomes a giant inspiration, a groundbreaking, ground-defying field biologist, and a hero for trees everywhere.
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Botany for the Artist
Understanding botany helps any artist draw plants better. In Botany for the Artist, celebrated artist Sarah Simblet takes you on a journey of discovery through the kingdom of plants--from tiny ferns and mosses to exotic flowers and majestic trees--encouraging you to observe them more closely and draw them more accurately.
Complemented by beautiful photographic plant portraits, Sarah's drawings reveal the structure of roots, stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits as she explains how plants breathe, feed, and produce fruits. If you have ever wondered how photosynthesis works, why leaves change color in the fall, where plants store food, or how seeds know when to grow, Botany for the Artist has all the answers.
Step-by-step drawing classes and detailed pages from Sarah's sketchbooks guide you through all the techniques that you need to draw plants successfully. Master classes by famous artists--from Renaissance masters to contemporary illustrators--showcase different approaches to drawing and painting plants over the centuries. Botany for the Artist is a visual feast, not just for anyone wishing to create fresh, vibrant, drawings, but for gardeners, photographers, and everyone who is passionate about plants and how they are portrayed in art.
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The Nature of Oaks
With Bringing Nature Home, Doug Tallamy changed the conversation about gardening in America. His second book, the New York Times bestseller Nature’s Best Hope, urged homeowners to take conservation into their own hands. Now, he is turning his advocacy to one of the most important species of the plant kingdom—the mighty oak tree.
Oaks sustain a complex and fascinating web of wildlife. The Nature of Oaks reveals what is going on in oak trees month by month, highlighting the seasonal cycles of life, death, and renewal. From woodpeckers who collect and store hundreds of acorns for sustenance to the beauty of jewel caterpillars, Tallamy illuminates and celebrates the wonders that occur right in our own backyards. He also shares practical advice about how to plant and care for an oak, along with information about the best oak species for your area. The Nature of Oaks will inspire you to treasure these trees and to act to nurture and protect them.
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Upstream
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”
So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us. -
The Treeline
For the last fifty years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. Ben Rawlence's The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, Canada to Sweden to meet the scientists, residents and trees confronting huge geological changes. Only the hardest species survive at these latitudes including the ice-loving Dahurian larch of Siberia, the antiseptic Spruce that purifies our atmosphere, the Downy birch conquering Scandinavia, the healing Balsam poplar that Native Americans use as a cure-all and the noble Scots Pine that lives longer when surrounded by its family.
It is a journey of wonder and awe at the incredible creativity and resilience of these species and the mysterious workings of the forest upon which we rely for the air we breathe. Blending reportage with the latest science, The Treeline is a story of what might soon be the last forest left and what that means for the future of all life on earth. -
Around the World in 80 Plants
An inspirational and beautifully illustrated book that tells the stories of 80 plants from around the globe.
In his follow-up to the bestselling Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori takes another trip across the globe, bringing to life the science of plants by revealing how their worlds are intricately entwined with our own history, culture and folklore. From the seemingly familiar tomato and dandelion to the eerie mandrake and Spanish "moss" of Louisiana, each of these stories is full of surprises. Some have a troubling past, while others have ignited human creativity or enabled whole civilizations to flourish. With a colorful cast of characters all brought to life by illustrator Lucille Clerc, this is a botanical journey of beauty and brilliance. -
Guardians of the Trees
When Kinari Webb first traveled to Indonesian Borneo at 21 to study orangutans, she was both awestruck by the beauty of her surroundings and heartbroken by the rainforest destruction she witnessed. As she got to know the local communities, she realized that their need to pay for expensive healthcare led directly to the rampant logging, which in turn imperiled their health and safety even further. Webb realized her true calling was at the intersection of medicine and conservation.
After graduating with honors from the Yale School of Medicine, Webb returned to Borneo, listening to local communities about their solutions for how to both protect the rainforests and improve their lives. Founding two non-profits, Health in Harmony in the U.S. and ASRI in Indonesia, Webb and her local and international teams partnered with rainforest communities, building a clinic, developing regenerative economies, providing educational opportunities, and dramatically transforming the region. But just when everything was going right, Webb was stung by a deadly box jellyfish and would spend the next four years fighting for her life, a fight that would lead her to rethink everything. Was she ready to expand her work to a global scale and take climate change head on?
Full of hope and optimism, Webb takes us on an exhilarating, galvanizing journey across the world, sharing her passion for the natural world and for humanity. In our current moment of crisis, Guardians of the Trees is an essential roadmap for moving forward and the inspiring story of one woman’s quest to heal the world. -
Orwell's Roses
A lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded by his passion for the natural world
“In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.” So be-gins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the roses he reportedly planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this overlooked aspect of Orwell’s life journeys through his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left) to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism.
Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers are drawn onward from Orwell‘s own work as a writer and gardener to encounter photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her politics, agriculture and illusion in the USSR of his time with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s examination of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes Solnit’s portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as offering a meditation on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
More Books About Trees for Kids
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We Planted a Tree
Perfect for springtime reading! In this poetic picture book with environmental themes, illustrated by award-winning artist Bob Staake, two young families in two very different parts of the world each plant a tree.
As the trees flourish, so do the families . . . while trees all over the world help clean the air, enrich the soil, and give fruit and shade.
With a nod to Kenya's successful Green Belt Movement, Diane Muldrow's elegant text celebrates the life and hope that every tree--from Paris to Brooklyn to Tokyo--brings to our planet. Now in paperback, this book can be enjoyed by children in classrooms everywhere. -
Trees Make Perfect Pets
Abigail is determined to get the perfect pet.
So she chooses Fido. He keeps her cool from the sun, stays where she tells him, and even gives her air to breathe. That's because Fido is a tree!
But not everyone thinks having a tree as a pet is a good idea, though, especially when Fido starts to grow. Will Abigail be able to keep her perfect pet?
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The Last Kids on Earth: Thrilling Tales from the Tree House
The kids and their monster buddies are hanging out in the tree house, when Jack launches into an epic, totally-heroic, super rad story of one of his many post-apocalyptic adventures. Of course, after he's finished, everyone's eager to one-up his tale with a story of their own. Soon, Quint, Dirk, June and Skaelka, and even Globlet regale the group with sometimes outrageous, often hilarious details of their action-packed escapades during the monster-zombie apocalypse.
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The Me Tree
Bear just wants a tree for himself. No roommates, no guests, just sweet solitude. So he packs up his things, finds a great listing for a spacious tree, and moves in. At first, it's perfect. Just what he wanted. But he soon realizes that his tree might not be just for him... in fact, there seem to be quite a few residents of this tree. Will Bear learn how to share his Me Tree?
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Trees : Kings of the Forest [graphic novel]
In Trees: Kings of the Forest we follow an acorn as it learns about its future as Earth's largest, longest-living plant. Starting with the seed's germination, we learn about each stage until the tree's maturation, different types of trees, and the roles trees take on in our ecosystem.
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The Treehouse Series : Book 10 : The 130-Story Treehouse
Andy and Terry live in a 130-story treehouse. It used to be a 117-story treehouse, but they added another 13 stories. It has a soap bubble blaster, a time-wasting level, a 13-story igloo, the GRABINATOR (it can grab anything from anywhere at any time). It is a toilet paper factory, and an extraterrestrial observation center for observing aliens. As it turns out, though, it's Andy, Terry, and Jill who are being observed and then abducted by a giant flying eyeball from outer space! At first they're excited to be going on an intergalactic space adventure, but when they arrive on Planet Eyeballia, they discover it's not at all a friendly place. Will the gang be able to escape, get back to Earth, and write their book before time runs out?
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A Green Place to Be: the Creation of Central Park
New York City needed a park -- a special spot to gather, play, and enjoy nature. A quiet, wild place made just for you. In 1858, New York City was growing so fast that new roads and tall buildings threatened to swallow up the remaining open space. The people needed a green place to be -- a park with ponds to row on and paths for wandering through trees and over bridges. When a citywide contest solicited plans for creating a park out of barren swampland, Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted put their heads together to create the winning design, and the hard work of making their plans a reality began. By winter, the lake opened for skating. By the next summer, the waterside woodland known as the Ramble opened for all to enjoy. Meanwhile, sculptors, stone masons, and master gardeners joined in to construct thirty-four unique bridges, along with fountains, pagodas, and band shells, making New York's Central Park a green gift to everyone. Included in the end matter are bios of Vaux and Olmsted, a bibliography, and engaging factual snippets.
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I Am the Lorax
The Lorax shares his love of animals and plants and need to "speak for the trees" in this simple, sturdy board book about caring for the environment. Written in rhymed verse, it's an ideal introduction to the story for toddlers and preschoolers too young for the classic picture book. Now everyone in the family--even pre-readers--can take pleasure in the frolics of the Brown Bar-ba-loots, Swomee-Swans, and Humming-Fish and embrace Dr. Seuss's timely message about protecting the planet!
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Planting Peace: The Story Of Wangari Maathai
This picture book tells the inspiring story of Wangari Maathai, women's rights activist and one of the first environmental warriors. Wangari began the Green Belt Movement in Kenya in the 1960s, which focused on planting trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. She inspired thousands across Africa to plant 30 million trees in 30 years and was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Explores environmental and political issues in an inspirational way Vibrant illustrations from print-maker Margaux Carpentier, one of the featured artists in Taschen's The Illustrator: 100 Best from Around the World.
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Weird, Wild, Amazing! Forest : Exploring the Incredible World in the Trees
Tim Flannery has the answers. Introducing some of the most spectacular and unusual creatures on Earth, from water to sky and the forests and deserts in between, he offers in-depth and often bizarre facts about extraordinary animals that live in each habitat. Flannery ties concepts of climate change, evolution, conservation, and taxonomy to each animal's profile, firmly connecting the animal and its environment while sparking wonder at its role in the natural world.
Did you know that lions once roamed North America, or that albatrosses sleep-fly? Have you ever heard a piranha bark, or wondered how the sloth got its name? Packed with vibrant illustrations and guided by real-life anecdotes from one of our greatest science communicators, Weird, Wild, Amazing! teaches readers to cherish and delight in our planet's ecosystems with Tim Flannery's signature mix of humor and wisdom.
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DC Comics : Wonder Woman Saves the Trees!
Poison Ivy wants to stop anyone who would dare destroy her beloved forest. Luckily, Wonder Woman is there to teach her that working together to help gets greener results than fighting. This Step 2 leveled reader with an environmental theme is perfect for young DC Super Hero fans ages 4 to 6. A fold-out Wonder Woman poster adds to the fun! Step 2 Step into Reading Leveled Readers use basic vocabulary and short sentences to tell simple stories. For children who recognize familiar words and can sound out new words with help.
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Zee Grows a Tree
Born at the same time a Douglas-fir seedling emerges from the nursery bed on her family's Christmas tree farm, young Zee grows up beside the tree as both thrive and become taller throughout the years.
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Be a Tree!
Compares the structures and functions of trees to human bodies, shows the interconnectness and dependence of trees in a forest, and urges readers to communicate, share, and care for one another. Includes notes on the anatomy of a tree, ways to help save trees, and how to help in one's community.
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Trillions of Trees: A Counting and Planting Book
Grab a shovel and get ready to plant some trees! From poplars to pines, alder, apple, peach, and plum, this rhyming story introduces the concept of orders of magnitude and celebrates the importance of planting different trees and preserving diverse ecosystems. Nurturing a new sapling is one of the first steps in growing hundreds, millions, even trillions of trees.
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The Second Life of Trees
Trees can live a very long time, but what happens when they die? This unusual book describes, in lyrical prose accompanied by colorful and graphic illustrations, that trees have a whole long second life, continuing to contribute to their habitat, the environment, and the cycle of life.
More Books About Trees for Teens
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Here in the Real World
Ware can't wait to spend summer "off in his own world"--dreaming of knights in the Middle Ages and generally being left alone. But then his parents sign him up for dreaded Rec camp, where he must endure Meaningful Social Interaction and whatever activities so-called "normal" kids do.
On his first day Ware meets Jolene, a tough, secretive girl planting a garden in the rubble of an abandoned church next to the camp. Soon he starts skipping Rec, creating a castle-like space of his own in the church lot.
Jolene scoffs, calling him a dreamer--he doesn't live in the "real world" like she does. As different as Ware and Jolene are, though, they have one thing in common: for them, the lot is a refuge.
But when their sanctuary is threatened, Ware looks to the knights' Code of Chivalry: Thou shalt do battle against unfairness wherever faced with it. Thou shalt be always the champion of the Right and Good--and vows to save the lot.
But what does a hero look like in real life? And what can two misfit kids do?
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Sprite and the Gardener
Long, long ago, sprites were the caretakers of gardens. Every flower was grown by their hand. But when humans appeared and began growing their own gardens, the sprites’ magical talents soon became a thing of the past. When Wisteria, an ambitious, kind-hearted sprite, starts to ask questions about the way things used to be, she’ll begin to unearth her long-lost talent of gardening. But her newly honed skills might not be the welcome surprise she intends them to be.
The Sprite and the Gardener, the debut graphic novel by Joe Whitt and Rii Abrego, is bursting with whimsical art and vibrant characters. Join our neighborhood of sprites in this beautiful, gentle fantasy where both gardens and friendships begin to blossom. -
Swamp Thing: Twin Branches
Twins Alec and Walker Holland have a reputation around town. One is quiet and the other is the life of any party, but the two are inseparable. For their last summer before college, Alec and Walker leave the city to live with their rural cousins, where they find that the swamp holds far darker depths than they could have imagined.
While Walker carves their names into the new social scene, laboratory, Alex recedes into a summer-school laboratory, because he brought something from home on their trip--it's an experiment that will soon consume him. This season, both brothers must confront truths, ancient and familial, and as their lives diverge, tensions increase and dormant memories claw to the surface.
From #1 New York Times bestselling authorMaggie Stiefvater (the Raven Cycle series) and artist Morgan Beem comes a story of shadows, both literal and imagined--and those that take form and haunt us.
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Supersimple Biology
Packed with all the core curriculum topics, this biology book for kids 12+ years old is ideal for home and school learning.
From reproduction to respiration and enzymes to ecosystems,
this guide makes complex topics easy to grasp at a glance.
Perfect support for coursework, homework, and studying for tests.Each topic is fully illustrated to support the information, make the facts crystal clear, and bring the science to life. For key ideas, "How It Works" and "Look Closer" boxes explain the theory with the help of simple graphics. And for studying, a handy "Key Facts" box provides a simple summary you can check back on later.
With clear, concise coverage of all the core biology topics, Super Simple Biology is the perfect accessible guide to biology for children, supporting classwork and making studying for tests the easiest it's ever been.
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Where Have All the Bees Gone?
Apples, blueberries, peppers, cucumbers, coffee, and vanilla. Do you like to eat and drink? Then you might want to thank a bee.
Bees pollinate 75 percent of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts grown in the United States. Around the world, bees pollinate $24 billion worth of crops each year. Without bees, humans would face a drastically reduced diet. We need bees to grow the foods that keep us healthy.
But numbers of bees are falling, and that has scientists alarmed. What's causing the decline? Diseases, pesticides, climate change, and loss of habitat are all threatening bee populations. Some bee species teeter on the brink of extinction. Learn about the many bee species on Earth -- their nests, their colonies, their life cycles, and their vital connection to flowering plants. Most importantly, find out how you can help these important pollinators.
"If we had to try and do what bees do on a daily basis, if we had to come out here and hand pollinate all of our native plants and our agricultural plants, there is physically no way we could do it. . . . Our best bet is to conserve our native bees." --ecologist Rebecca Irwin, North Carolina State University
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The Price Guide to the Occult
When Rona Blackburn landed on Anathema Island more than a century ago, her otherworldly skills might have benefited friendlier neighbors. Guilt and fear instead led the island's original eight settlers to burn "the witch" out of her home. So Rona cursed them. Fast-forward one hundred-some years: All Nor Blackburn wants is to live an unremarkable teenage life. She has reason to hope: First, her supernatural powers, if they can be called that, are unexceptional. Second, her love life is nonexistent, which means she might escape the other perverse side effect of the matriarch's backfiring curse, too. But then a mysterious book comes out, promising to cast any spell for the right price. Nor senses a storm coming and is pretty sure she'll be smack in the eye of it. In her second novel, Leslye Walton spins a dark, mesmerizing tale of a girl stumbling along the path toward self-acceptance and first love, even as the Price Guide's malevolent author -- Nor's own mother -- looms and threatens to strangle any hope for happiness.
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Poison Ivy: Thorns
There's something unusual about Pamela Isley--the girl who hides behind her bright red hair. The girl who won't let anyone inside to see what's lurking behind the curtains. The girl who goes to extreme lengths to care for a few plants. Pamela Isley doesn't trust other people, especially men. They always want something from her that she's not willing to give.
When cute goth girl Alice Oh comes into Pamela's life after an accident at the local park, she makes her feel like pulling back the curtains and letting the sunshine in. But there are dark secrets deep within the Isley house. Secrets Pamela's father has warned must remain hidden. Secrets that could turn deadly and destroy the one person who ever cared about Pamela, or as her mom preferred to call her...Ivy.
Will Pamela open herself up to the possibilities of love, or will she forever be transformed by the thorny vines of revenge?
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When Plants Attack
Science writer and plant expert Rebecca E. Hirsch presents fun and gross facts about a variety of plants along with explaining the science behind why they do what they do. Featured plants include the Venus Flytrap, an African tree that houses stinking ants to protect itself from hungry animals, a "vampire vine" that sucks nutrients from other plants, and fiendishly invasive kudzu.
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The Way of the Hive
Experience the life of a honeybee in this coming-of-age story about a bee named Nyuki, in this full-color graphic novel by Jay Hosler, perfect for curious kids who are fans of the Science Comics series.
Nyuki is a brand-new honeybee--and she has a lot of questions. Like
- When does a bee go through metamorphosis?
- Why does a queen bee sometimes leave her hive?
- And where does all this honey come from, anyway?!
But Nyuki's biggest question is, "What is this inner voice I hear, and why does it tell me to go forth to adventure?
Follow Nyuki on a lifelong journey as she annoys her sisters, avoids predators, and learns to trust her inner voice as she masters the way of the hive.
And if you still have questions at the end, the back of the book uncovers even more mysteries about the lives of these incredible insects!
Junior Library Guild Selection
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Illustration School: Let's Draw Plants and Small Creatures
Learn to draw plants, animals, and more in the distinctive Japanese character style—and have fun while you’re creating!
Let popular Japanese artist Sachiko Umoto show you simple methods for sketching butterflies, flowers, cactus, bees, birds, fish, and more. Build on basic lines and shapes to create flower petals, butterfly wings, tree branches, and leaves. Discover helpful tips that will improve your drawing skills, such as focusing on how branches grow, differences in flower shapes, and how poses express emotion.
See how easy it is to turn plants and animals into sweet expressive characters by adding facial expressions and clothes. A singing butterfly? Why not! Sachiko’s clear step-by-step instructions for tracing and drawing are perfect for all ages and skill levels. After mastering a few elements, build a composition that shows off your unique style. Draw lovely bouquets, sunny fields of flowers, or sketch a rabbit running by a tree. In no time you’ll be creating doodles and illustrations every day in sketchbooks, art journals—anywhere you can. -
Weird Plants
In this little book of horrors, Chris Thorogood reveals the weird, the wonky, and the sinister specimens he has encountered during his travels in the wide world of plants. Far from passively absorbing the sun's rays, these plants kill, steal and kidnap, making them dynamic participants in the ecosystems around them. From orchids that duplicitously look, feel and even smell like a female insect to bamboozle sex-crazed male bees to giant pitcher plants that have evolved toilets for tree shrews to carnivorous plants that drug, drown, and consume unsuspecting insect prey, Weird Plants takes us deep inside the worlds of plants whose imaginative and calculating survival methods are startlingly reminiscent of human schemes.
To guide us through these unfamiliar plantscapes, Thorogood has organized his book into seven categories fit for a horror film: Vampires, Killers, Fraudsters, Jailers, Accomplices, Survivors, and Hitchhikers. These categories take us through a variety of plant life and around the world, documenting the remote corners where many of these specimens are found. Through the combination of Thorogood's oil paintings and botanical expertise, these fantastic plants come alive on the page.
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Wild Beauty
Love grows such strange things.
For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They’ve also hidden a tragic legacy: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens.
The boy is a mystery to Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, and to her family, but he’s even more a mystery to himself; he knows nothing more about who he is or where he came from than his first name. As Estrella tries to help Fel piece together his unknown past, La Pradera leads them to secrets as dangerous as they are magical in this stunning exploration of love, loss, and family. -
This Poison Heart
Darkness blooms in bestselling author Kalynn Bayron’s new contemporary fantasy about a girl with a unique and deadly power.
Briseis has a gift: with a single touch she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms.
When Briseis’s aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents hope that surrounded by plants and flowers, she will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they never expected—it comes with a mysterious set of instructions, a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world, and generations of secrets. There is more to Bri’s sudden inheritance than she could have imagined, and she is determined to uncover it.
From the bestselling author of Cinderella Is Dead comes an enchanting story about a young woman with the power to conquer the dark forces descending around her.