| Author/Contributor(s): | Dark, Ben |
| Publisher: | Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster |
| Date: | 1/26/2027 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
A captivating exploration of the weird ways plants have found to survive and thrive, from the earliest mosses to the most fragrant orchids and toxic cycads, for fans of The Light Eaters, 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 and the people who identified and categorized them, Green Kingdom tells the epic tale of how plant-life emerged, adapted, and came to shape our planet. Beginning with the lowly club mosses and working his way up the Tree of Life through the ferns, pines, palms, and ginkgos to the giant water lilies that so obsessed a generation of gardeners, Ben Dark reveals how plants developed stems, leaves, trunks and seeds, how flowers emerged, and how some species came up with the capacity for 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 and delighted in its oddities over centuries of observation and inquiry.
Time traveling over 300 million years, we meet the families responsible for life’s great innovations: the evolution of true leaves, the development of wood in the carboniferous swamps, and then of seeds, perfume, and floral abundance. Green Kingdom takes us from Earth’s first sludgy life to the showy flowers that adorn our gardens and shows how a single specimen today contains within it an epic story of adaptation and survival stretching back millions of years. Bursting with life in all its permutations, it 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, Green Kingdom is a riotous family saga, as full of seduction and betrayal as any story ever told.