Botanical Short Stories: Contemporary Writing about Plants and Flowers
Botanical Short Stories: Contemporary Writing about Plants and Flowers
Emma Timpany (Ed.)
The History Press
2024
9781803993096Hardcover
20.5 x 13.5 x 1.9 cm
189 pages
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From tokens of love to neolithic burial gifts, bridal bouquets to seasonal wreaths, healing potions to artistic masterpieces, flowers and plants have a multitude of meanings and a long and complex relationship with us. They brighten our homes and delight us in garden and countryside, convey our emotions and symbolise the stages of our human lives. Throughout the anthology, interactions with the natural world bring opportunities for new beginnings, transformation, and a chance to heal.
A group of botanists in search of rare species dismiss local custom at their peril. Love in all its wildness and wonder is found clinging to crumbling chalk cliffs and growing through cracks on city streets. A scientist takes a radical step to understand her houseplant. A poet remembers her beloved flowers, and the longing for a magnificent tropical garden outlasts death.
This rich and wide-ranging collection celebrates the deep connection that exists between people and plants in fourteen short stories as varied, diverse, and global as the botanical world itself.
Reviews
These short stories - about all manner of green and growing things - are tender, lyrical, and compelling. Whether real or imagined, familiar or exotic, delicate or potent, the plants and flowers depicted offer insightful meditations into the ways that the lives of plants can become entwined with our own.
Becky Tipper, writer and reviews editor at The Short Story
The stories are all so very different, some of them being quite compelling and tender featuring an interesting variety of voices and nationalities with a wide range of characters and settings
Advolly Richmond, Garden writer, historian, and a television presenter, who regularly appears on BBC Gardener's World
A lovely collection of short stories with plants front and centre. If you’re a gardener or plant lover, then this is a book for you.
Leif Bersweden, Author of Where the Wildflowers Grow and Botanist
This is the first time I have read a fiction collection entirely around the botanical, and editor Emma Timpany has done an impressive job of selecting a range of moving, absorbing, and sometimes surprising stories.
Hortus Journal
Throughout this anthology, interaction with the natural world bring opportunities, new beginnings, and a chance to heal. This book is entertaining and a joy to dip in and out of.
Countryside magazine
