Green Kingdom

“Utterly fascinating. I don't expect to read a better work of natural history this year.” —Bill Bryson • “Ben Dark has the unusual ability to see both the forest and the trees. A fascinating account of man’s long and tangled association with plants.” —Elizabeth Kolbert • “What an awesome book....I learned something on every page.” —Nigel Slater

A captivating exploration of the weird and wonderful ways plants have found to survive and thrive for readers of The Serviceberry and The Invention of Nature.

Nearly four hundred thousand species of plants exist today, but many more have come and gone. What made these ones survive? Through the stories of sixteen plant families responsible for life’s great innovations, Green Kingdom tells the epic tale of how plant-life emerged, adapted and came to shape our planet.

Beginning with the lowly mosses and working his way up the Tree of Life through the ferns, pines, palms, and ginkgoes to the giant water lilies that obsessed a generation of Victorian gardeners and beyond, Ben Dark reveals how plants developed stems, leaves, trunks and seeds, how flowers emerged and developed the capacity to create deadly poisons, intoxicating scents and parasitic entrapments. A passionate plantsman who delights in the strange ways of the natural world, he introduces us along the way to the adventurers, botanists, poets, inventors and taxonomers who pieced together this story over centuries of observation and inquiry, sometimes sacrificing their lives or losing their minds in service to their obsessions.

A single specimen alive today contains within it an epic story of adaptation and survival stretching back 400 million years. Time traveling to moments of near extinction and rebirth, Ben Dark reveals the many ways plants have shaped us, seeding our desires and sending roots into the deepest recesses of our imagination. A hymn to the inventiveness and interconnectedness of the natural world, bursting with life in all its permutations, this is a riotous family saga, as full of seduction and betrayal as any story ever told. “Elegant, erudite and entrancing. This is a book you’ll want to read once for its fascinating information and colorful stories, and again, just for the sheer pleasure of it” (Robert Moor, New York Times bestselling author).