Green Kingdom: The Family History of Plants

Description:

The epic story of the plant kingdom, showing its staggering variety and ingenuity over half a billion years, from an extraordinary new talent in natural-history writing.

Most of life on Earth is plant. And yet the half a million species of plant alive today are a minuscule fraction of those that have ever existed. The true story of the plant kingdom's almost inconceivable variety and ingenuity is to be found in the past.

From the arrival of the first plants on land 484 million years ago to the globe-spanning diversity of flora we know today, this book traces the evolution of plant life across aeons and continents, reanimating the lost worlds that shaped its course and dramatically expanding our vision of what it means to be a plant. Through the stories of sixteen plant families, from the humble bog moss to the exquisite adaptations of the orchid, we witness how plant life colonised land, pioneered leaves, recruited fungi, invented wood, sunk roots, formed seeds, manipulated animals and ultimately came to dominate our planet. Some take us to unrecognisable Earths, to a world buried under twelve thousand years of ice or hidden in the blackout of an asteroid winter. Each represents a response to a defining event in the planet's history, from volcanic chain eruptions and sudden glaciations to the gradual parting of continents. Along the way, we swim with eelgrass, meet desert succulents that live for millennia, marvel at duckweed, the only plant that seasonally migrates, discover the secret to buttercups' iridescence and why 99.5% of life was once fern.

Inhabiting the lives and minds of the adventurers, poets, philosophers and scientists who pieced this epic story together and bringing the wonder and stupendous variety of plants to life as never before, this book is both a hidden history of the Earth and a dynastic drama, as rich and unexpected as any story ever told.