The Best Books on Plants – Five Books Expert Recommendations

the emerald planet by dj beerling.

This is a book by someone who studies plant fossils and their role in life on earth. i checked this when it came out and this is what i wrote: ‘botanists wear a chip on their shoulders. his relationship to the zoocentric world is like that of a perplexed father of a surly adolescent who refuses to acknowledge that his very existence depends on them. we do not recognize the importance of plants. Beerling believes that many people think that plants are a rather boring chapter in the story of life and can be skipped. He complains that Richard Dawkins all but ignores plants in his study of life, and Beerling’s resentment is palpable.

the emerald planet is a serious conversation about why plants should not be ignored”. I agree with him that plants are sadly overlooked, because without them there would be no life on earth. everything is plants or something that eats them and this book basically explains the place of plants in the history of the earth. explains, for example, how the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere comes from plants, the role of plants and trees in the carbon cycle, and of course we all understand that carbon has a role in controlling our climate today in day. so if you want to know about that, then this is the book.

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what is the role of the plant in the history of the earth?

Basically, the early earth had no oxygen in its atmosphere, and when the first life arose, single-celled microbial matter, oxygen was poisonous to it, because it interfered with important biochemical reactions. what the plants, or the bacteria in the ocean, did was develop a way to harness carbon from sunlight and release oxygen in the process. over time, what happened is that oxygen built up in the atmosphere and you can see it in the fossil record. there are geological strata called red beds, deposits rich in iron. they’re red because the iron oxidized when exposed to oxygen, so there’s a point in earth’s history where you can see oxygen appear because the iron in the soil oxidized.

so if it’s not rusted, there was no oxygen?

That’s right. if you place an iron nail in an atmosphere without oxygen, it won’t rust, but in normal air it will.

The book I’m talking about right now is “Eating the Sun: How Plants Feed the Planet” by Oliver Morton. this book is basically about discovering how photosynthesis works. thus, photosynthesis is converting carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight into something useful to both plants and us: sugar and oxygen. the process of photosynthesis evolved in these things called blue-green bacteria three billion years ago and this is the foundation on which evolution has built everything else. it’s the same process in those bacteria and blue-green algae in the sea and plants on land: they all use a version of the process that evolved three billion years ago. it’s an amazing story and that’s why botanists feel bad because you think: well, actually, this is interesting, and we depend on it, so don’t ignore it! the blue-green bacteria, through a process we’re still figuring out, passed on the genes that make the photosynthetic machinery to other organisms, and that aspect of evolution gave rise to a great diversity of things that are green. i’m sitting here in my home den and i can see a palm and cacti and other plants and the relationship between these plants is ancient but they’re all green and they all use the same way of capturing energy. that’s also true for algae in the sea and in your fish tank.

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Is this a book I could easily read?

this is a very enjoyable book, less technical than the emerald planet. goes into biochemistry, but you can skip parts! makes the story personal by talking about the lives of the people who discovered photosynthesis, or rather, how it works. there’s a whole series of people and he only picks a few of them. he tells the story like a narrative and then goes on to talk about the kind of things beerling talks about, red beds and stuff like that.

the secret life of trees by colin tudge.

This is basically a book for tree lovers and, in a way, it’s a bit of a catalogue. talk about what makes a tree a tree. a tree is a woody plant with a trunk, which is a pretty obvious definition, but that way of being a plant has evolved many times. so trees are not, evolutionarily speaking, a thing. they are a group of things with different evolutionary origins. for example, pines and oaks have quite different origins. they are seed plants, but they got into the habit of standing on a long tall trunk independently of each other. its ‘treeness’ evolved independently. palm trees are a good example: they developed the habit of standing as they do quite apart from oaks and pines. it is a different way of being a tree. The interesting thing about palms is that if you plant an oak seedling after five years it is five centimeters in diameter, after ten years it is 20 centimeters and so on, but that is not how palms grow. palms do not get fat as they age. a baby palm tree sits on the ground gathering leaves until she is fat enough to grow upwards. once it starts to do that, you’ll see that a three-foot-tall baby palm has a trunk that will eventually support something thirty feet tall. the reason for this is that they are not built in a way that allows them to get fat, because the trunk is made from the bases of old leaves. the coconut germinates and many leaves accumulate like a huge rosette and only when it has enough of them can it start to grow upwards. but, an oak starts out thin and gets fat. these are entirely different evolutionary tracks. therefore, this book is about the different ways of being a tree, all the trees in the world in their different groups: non-flowering trees, conifers, magnolias (which is a relatively primitive early tree), etc. So if you like trees, and many people do, this book is for you. you have done very well.

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why did the trees grow upwards?

We can’t really know because it happened a long time ago, but it happened after the colonization of the earth by plants. life evolved in the sea and the earliest photosynthetic fossils are of things that lived in shallow water. finally, plants colonized the land and there is a small fossil, the size of a moss, which is the first land plant. but as competition between plants grew, trees evolved, almost certainly driven by the simple fact that the tallest plant gets the most light.

plant by janet marinelli.

This is a coffee table book, but it’s a very, very good coffee table book. It is produced by Kew Gardens and has fabulous pictures, full page plant spreads and just about everything you could want to know about plants in general. there’s a section called ‘the world of plants’ about their evolution and what they do for us, a section on weeds, and if you love plants, this is a fun book to read. it is quite dense. It’s not a children’s book by any means and it’s about conservation and global warming and it’s full of pictures and it’s very enjoyable. bulbous plants, climbing plants, bamboos. everything.

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what are your favourites?

I like palm trees better.

Are you surrounded by palm trees?

hopefully! I have a greenhouse with some, but if I had to choose a plant that I haven’t seen in the wild, unfortunately it would have to be the double coconut. this thing lives on just two islands in the seychelles and it has this massive seed, the largest in the world, and, somewhat unusual for plants, this palm has separate males and females. the poor females are so stunted from having to carry these massive seeds on their crowns that they often lose the tops of the trees in storms and the like. it has a fascinating life history that you can read about in my very own seed book.

book five, feeding the ten billion l t evans.

This is where it gets serious. It is estimated that we currently have seven billion people on the planet. The UN estimates that the population will continue to grow to at least nine billion, maybe ten billion. if you think for a moment what that means: when I was born, 50 years ago, there were about two billion people on the planet. then, in my life it has gone from two to seven and certainly before my children are my age they will be nine or ten. how are we going to feed these people? That is what the book is about. goes through every billion, one at a time. thus, between 8000 a. c. and the 2000 a. c. the world population became 50 million. That is a smaller global population than the current population of Great Britain. therefore, in those days it would be very unusual to run into someone who was not immediately related to you. cut to the chase: how are we going to feed ten billion? what evans says is: “feeding the ten billion without increasing the arable land will require an average yield of about five tons per hectare, higher than that achieved by europe and north america”. I am not so optimistic. he thinks it will be done because there have already been staggering increases in agricultural yields so far, due to plant breeding combined with the industrialization of agriculture. he says that the need to do this is so great that, if we invest in science and technology, it can be done. though he admits it’s something of a leap of faith.

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Do we really think the population will grow that much? maybe we’ll all be eliminated before it gets too bad.

well, that would be even worse! I have a book behind me on the shelf called Our Last Century by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal. so obviously if we don’t handle it, I guess that solves the problem. but otherwise it is inevitable that we will reach nine billion. for example, half the population of egypt is under 15 years of age. They will grow up and have families. you just have to do the math, as they say. evans thinks it’s technically possible to feed them, but there’s obviously a lot of politics involved etc. is a sobering book to read and raises all sorts of questions. we have to ask ourselves what technology would be involved and if it was necessary to use gm technology, could we really afford to say no? Evans concludes that we have managed to produce more and more food, and as long as we use science to do this, we could feed ten billion people. I could consider that as good news. but how much would be left of nature if we used most of the planet to grow food? we would have to expand the area of ​​land that is used to grow food. furthermore, if we are going to use biofuels, part of that area will have to be devoted to running our cars. What will remain of wilderness if we fail to fully exploit all the land we are already using? these are tough decisions.

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