Chasing Plants: Journeys with a Botanist Through Rainforests, Swamps and Mountains

This is a specialist item -- a botanist taking you along on field trips to various locations around the world. He describes his travel and hikes and the plants he seeks, and says a little about the people he meets along the way. But the main emphasis is on the plants he seeks and finds. This is not a botany book. I personally wish he'd taken a bit more time to describe the plants. For example, his speciality are parasitic plants. He describes several, but doesn't go into any detail as to how the function, or how they evolved, or how they are related, taxonomically, to other plants -- all things I would have like to have learned a bit about. What we do learn is where a few of them are located, and the hassles he has to go through to get to them.It's an interesting book if you are really into following a world class botanist around the world, and the illustrations are nice -- but it could have been so much more.

If you’re a fan of stories from the golden age of plant exploration, if you’ve enjoyed reading the adventures of E.H. “Chinese” Wilson, David Fairchild, or Reginald Farrer, if you want to experience the thrill of traveling the world in search of rare and exotic plants, or if you’ve ever wondered if plant exploration still goes on in the 21st century, THIS IS THE BOOK FOR YOU. Thorogood is a young botanist from the Oxford Botanic Garden with a taste for adventure, a nose for weird plants, and a gift for getting it all down in words and pictures. He is equal parts portraitist and wordsmith. His prose is just as engaging and lively as his realistic plant paintings. This book is a wonderful romp through deserts, sea cliffs and rainforests – without the mosquitoes, leeches, and blistering heat.