2024 Botany Books: Notes On What I’ve Been Reading

*Every Living Thing The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life 

by Jason Roberts (Random House, 2024) - 432 pages

* Dispersals On Plants, Borders and Belonging 

by Jessica J. Lee (Catapult, 2024) - 270 pages

  *Planting the World Joseph Banks and His Collectors An Adventurous History 

of Botany by Jordan Goodman (William Collins, 2020) - 520 pages

These three titles — two of which are new for 2024 — have kept my attention since I published Get Out There last Summer. They all bring strong story-telling to bear on core botanical issues long debated by nature lovers, whether scientifically trained or not. 

First, how and why should the world’s vast range of plants be identified and categorized? Should we rely chiefly on observable characteristics? Or on evolutionary family trees (i.e., genes and descent), even though a plant's history (written in DNA) may be hidden to the naked eye? And if we choose the latter — naming and dividing plants into smaller and smaller taxa (for example, by family, genus, species as is the current scientific convention) — how does this line-drawing process impact the way we respond to the natural world?

For example, is nature merely a large collection of discrete, separate things (no more than the sum of its parts) which we can label and may readily manipulate? Or is nature an interconnected living whole of which we are an integral and inseparable part (an Umwelt or felt environment, to borrow the German expression), that cannot be taken apart without significant consequences?

Second, what accounts for the extraordinary geographic distribution of plant life in our own locales and beyond? Why do we find plants growing where we do? How did they get there? And what role did we, Homo sapiens, play in that process?  

You can find an overview and some flavor of each book below. I’ll be posting more extended thoughts on these three titles later in the month. 

Every Living Thing 

Roberts' book offers a deeply researched and entertaining double biography. It is animated by juxtaposing the divergent approaches to natural science taken by two famous 18th century contemporaries: the Swedish doctor, Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), and the French polymath, Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-1788). 

Linnaeus is well known as the father of scientific taxonomy, sometimes referred to as systematics. He introduced a standardized means for naming and classifying the natural world, primarily according to an organism’s observable characteristics. It is based on a binomial or two-part combination of Latin (or Greek) names, the first denoting genus and the second, the species (e.g., Homo sapiens).

Buffon, though much lesser-known today, is regarded as one of the fathers of ecology. Starting in 1749, he published a popular 30 volume encyclopedia of nature (the Histoire Naturelle) and was the Intendant or Director of the garden (the Jardin du Roi ) owned by France’s last king, Louis XVI (1754-1793).  Buffon doubted whether the abstract categories which Linnaeus used to order and label nature actually had a real, physical existence across the natural world. 

For Buffon, as Robert’s puts it, “life was more finely calibrated than labels,” more compound. To him, says Roberts, “systems were masks imposed upon nature,” reflecting the observer’s intellectual prejudices. Hence, Roberts refers to Buffon as a “complexist.” 

Much of Every Living Thing is designed to rehabilitate Buffon’s approach and explain its relevance for a 21st century audience that may be more sympathetic to a wholistic, less reductionist view of nature. See e.g., Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer and The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Gosh.

That said, Every Living Thing is primarily an exercise in intellectual history.  It is richly illustrated with passages about the day-to-day lives of the chief protagonists (there are vivid tales of the boisterous student bio-blitzes or herbaciones led by Linnaeus in the 1740’s; and notes on Buffon’s social circle at the Court of Versailles which, notably, included America’s first emissary, Benjamin Franklin). Yet, Roberts falls short on practical advice.

How might Buffon’s complexist approach (or other alternatives to systematics) temper the way we study and write about nature today?  Roberts doesn’t say. There is nary a word, for instance, about how Buffon's legacy (or the animist approach of Braiding Sweetgrass) might inform contemporary field guides or media coverage of the environment. This is something I wrestled with frequently in preparing my Get Out There wildflower guide. More on this later on.

Dispersals

While hard to classify – Dispersals is part botanical inquiry, part memoir and part social commentary – this is another rewarding read. The book comprises a series of elegantly written, linked essays which probe the stories of plants that might be considered "out of place”. That unbounded status is increasingly common in a world of large scale human migration and buoyant global trade.

Lee writes, she says, as “neither an ecologist nor a horticulturist but as an [environmental] historian.” Her essays are "written for a world in motion.”  They draw on her own migratory history (being born in Canada of Welsh and Taiwanese immigrants) as well as her peripatetic work life (the essays took shape between 2020 and 2022 when she moved between Cambridge, London and Berlin). 

Reflecting her own life story, the essays range over an eclectic potpourri of plants, most having found life far from their original habitats. They include inquiries on invasive pond life (European water milfoil and sago pondweed); on the history of cherry trees gifted to Berlin by Japan after the fall of the wall between the East and West; on the sweetness of mangoes, domesticated some 4000 years ago, whose scientific name (Mira indicia)  points to the fruit’s origins in the foothills of the Himalayas; on the Americanization of soybeans and Yamei Kin, the first Chinese-American woman to earn a U.S. medical degree who led the Department of Agriculture’s lab that was tasked with introducing soybeans to the American diet.

There is also a chapter on tangelos, a grapefruit-orange hybrid that is but one of many citrus crosses (think mandarins, pomelos, limes) that can be genetically traced over thousands of years to several wild orange species in China.

And why should we consider the legacy of oranges, asks Lee. “Because in the past ten years scholars …have grappled with the notion of the Anthropocene, arguing that our geologic era is best described by our human transformation of the natural world. But a group of anthropologists have put forward another suggestion…’Plantationocene’ [given that] systems of cultivation, global transport, plant transfers, and power [best] characterize our era.”

One of the most insightful essays (“Words for the Tea”) looks at the language of displacement. What do we mean when we say something is native or invasive, indigenous or alien. And how does the language -- often freighted with social and political overtones -- affect our efforts to conserve the natural world. How do we decide that a plant belongs and others do not?

Even if we choose to frame our language in terms of impact — of ecological harm — rather than of botanical citizenship (alien or native) we tend to assume "that there was once a time when nature was pristine.” When was that? What state of nature overlaid by what geo-political order do we wish to preserve? 

For example, Lee notes that in 2023 the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland published a new plant atlas which found that introduced species in Britain now out-number native ones (1,753 to 1,692 native species). “How then can we dwell in a zone of imperfection — managing one species while accepting others, in language that does the same — when centuries of global transformation cannot be, and wouldn’t desirably be, undone?” 

In a similar vein, Lee writes: “In a world rife with human intervention, are weeds really just ‘plants out of place’?”  Think again, says Lee. “[T]hanks largely to the ship hulls and ballast waters of our cargo industries,” some water plants such as wakame now "have a 'global nonnative range’. Read that again: it is everywhere but it is still out of place.” [Emphasis added.]

In Colorado, we know that feeling. Consider thistles, dandelions, loosestrife and lambs quarter (to name but a few). They appear to be everywhere, often having naturalized, but are still labeled weeds –  plants that are out of place. Or are they?

Lee argues for a more nuanced approach to describing nature. “I do not think our orders for the [natural] world are fixed.” Plants are continually changing their climes. “Our language” for describing these changes “shifts too. It must.”

 More on Jessica Lee’s thoughts in the full review.

Planting the World

 If you want a one-stop historical account of how thousands of different plants – both commonplace and exotic – came to be dispersed from their native habitats, Jordan Goodman’s book offers a strong starting point. It also serves as an instructive prequal to Lee’s book (focusing mainly on the late 18th and early 19th centuries).

Planting the World provides a meticulously researched account of the primary plant-collecting expeditions commissioned, at least in part, by Sir Joseph Banks who presided over Britain’s Kew gardens (then The Royal Botanic Gardens) and the influential Royal Society for over 40 years from the 1770’s.

Banks first made a name for himself as the chief “naturalist” on Captain James Cook’s initial circumnavigation of the globe (Banks was only 25 at the outset). He subsequently used his inherited wealth (he was one of the country’s largest landowners), multifarious scientific interests and close connection to King George III to initiate numerous plant-collecting expeditions.

In so doing, Banks sought to make the King’s Garden the world’s leading repository of plants while quietly expanding his own botanical collections too. Banks was adroit at linking his personal interests to King and country. He was an unabashed champion of expanded British trade in plant stock (and seeds) to further the country’s colonial ambitions from the Americas to India and much of Asia, including especially Australia (Banks was instrumental in provisioning the continent’s first penal colonies with crop and garden plants.)

Goodman’s book is divided into 22 chapters arranged chronologically from 1772  to 1815. Drawing on innumerable original sources (letters, diaries, official documents), Goodman recounts the extraordinary achievements of Bank’s major plant collecting and trading missions. Each chapter also includes fascinating biographical details on the unusual men who led these voyages, often losing their lives in the process (at the time, women were thought unfit for such work and, in any case, were de facto banned from Royal Navy vessels).

Among Bank’s leading collectors were: Francis Masson, a former Kew gardener who sent back hundreds of native plants from South Africa (including novel geraniums);  Arthur Menzies who botanized for Banks in the Pacific Northwest as well as California and Hawaii (he brough the first oil bearing jojoba plants to England); and John Reeves, a tea taster for the East India Company, who was dispatched tin 1812 to Canton in vain hopes of breaking China’s monopoly in tea. That happened only in 1848 when, following trade concessions, another British plant hunter, Robert Fortune, also profiled in Jessica Lee’s book, was able to disperse Chinese plants to Assam in colonial northeast India.  

Bank’s botanical missions also included those of Captain William Bligh (1754-1817), best remembered for losing the HMS Bounty off Tahiti to a 1789 mutiny led by Christian Fletcher. Few know that Bligh sailed to the South Pacific, in part, to collect and transplant breadfruit trees (favored by Banks from his Tahitian visit with Cook) to slave-based plantations in the West Indies. Banks believed that breadfruit would provide a cheap and sustainable food for their workforce. (There were over 1000 potted breadfruits trees aboard the Bounty prior to the mutiny.)

Bligh was not one to be put off by near death experiences. Following the mutiny, he navigated the Bounty’s 23 foot long life boat over 3,600 nautical miles to Indonesia and then, after returning to England, in 1791 Bligh captained a second mission for Banks to Tahiti.  That voyage succeeding in bringing hundreds of breadfruit trees over 10,000 nautical miles to plantations in Jamaica and St. Vincent.

It all went for naught. A recent biography of Banks (The Multifarious Mr. Banks by Toby Musgrave) reports that while the trees thrived, unlike native Tahitians, the west-African peoples sold to British plantations found breadfruit inedible. Hence, it seems that the chief botanical legacy of Bank’s initiative (and Bligh’s remarkable effort) was the transplantation from Tahiti of a robust strain of sugar cane which soon became a mainstay of agriculture in the West Indies and beyond.

 I’ll post some further thoughts about Planting the World shortly.