A wonderful get together of the sweetness, variety, significance and sheer ask yourself of the main extraordinary vegetation that form our international, with beautiful illustrations from the incomparable collections of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The authors are specialist courses to the exciting histories, importance and makes use of of over eighty key vegetation, revealing our advanced courting with them, either to be used and sweetness. wealthy in cultural, historic, botanical and symbolic institutions, the vegetation offered right here, from each nook of the globe, either generic and peculiar, all have attention-grabbing tales to tell.

Sections hide each point of our interplay with vegetation, beginning with meals that laid the rules for the advance of civilizations, resembling wheat, rice and maize, and people who liven up our vitamin, equivalent to saffron and spices. different sections examine crops that experience helped to accommodate us, together with bamboo and the oak, or vegetation that experience made humans wealthy, significantly tea, espresso and sugar cane.

Many vegetation were used medicinally, from willow to the Madagascar periwinkle. a few are the gadgets of obsession or are respected, together with the tulip, the rose and the lotus, and a few are weird and wonderful, comparable to the world's greatest flower, rafflesia, which smells of rotting flesh.

For someone attracted to the sweetness and variety of vegetation, this pretty ebook, richly illustrated with over 2 hundred drawings and work, should be an proposal and a delight.