BOOKSHELF

Natural History, May, 1999

Flora Britannica: The Concise Edition

By Richard Mabey (Chatto and Windus, 1998; $29.95; 271 pp.; illus.)

The Flora Britannica project--launched in 1991 with a call for information from schools, community groups, and individuals--describes Britain's wild plants and their role in local culture. "Despite being one of the most industrialized and urbanized countries on earth," writes British nature writer Mabey, who organized the survey, Britain clings to "plant rituals and mystical gestures whose roots stretch back into prehistory."

The Clutius Botanical Watercolors: Plants and Flowers of the Renaissance

By Claudia Swan (Harry N. Abrams, 1998; $45; 143 pp.; illus.)

This stunning portfolio of rare botanical art was collected by the late-sixteenth-century pharmacist Theodorus Clutius. The collection was much admired and copied in its own day and used by artists and doctors. The 125 full-page color plates have been selected from among the roughly 1,800 originals that are now in the Jagiellon University Library in Crakow.

The Writer in the Garden

Edited by Jane Garmey (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1999; $18.95; 265pp.)

In this beautifully designed volume, more than fifty gardening writers--and writing gardeners--share their thoughts on such topics as ornery weeds, the hazards of rare plant collecting, and the tribulations of inclement weather. "How could such sweet and wholesome hours/Be reckoned but with herbs and flowers?" wonders seventeenth-century English poet Andrew Marvell, while Harper's contributing editor Michael Pollan describes "the extravagant, splendid blooms" of roses, which, "like true aristocrats, never seem to acknowledge the plant that supports them, or the fact that their own petals were once mere leaves."

The Forgotten Pollinators

By Stephen L. Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan (Island Press, 1997; $16.95; 320 pp.; illus.)

Nabhan, an ethnobotanist based in Tucson, has written a number of books about the desert and its people. This one, written with entomologist Buchmann, describes the loss of pollinators from habitat destruction and the unabating use of pesticides. In learning how a bumblebee visits a pea flower or how the nearly extinct Hawaiian honeycreeper sips nectar from the curved blossom of Clermontia (which cannot be pollinated by any other bird), the reader begins to realize how the loss of these pollinators can lead to the collapse of whole populations of plants.

Gardening for Love: The Market Bulletins

By Elizabeth Lawrence; edited by Allen Lacy (Duke University Press, 1997; $16. 95; 238 pp.)

Lawrence is one of those garden writers who bring literature, philosophy, landscape design, dirt gardening, and the voices of her friends and neighbors into the garden. Her books--A Southern Garden, The Little Bulbs, Gardens in Winter--are enlivened by her genius for trading both plants and stories, but this one is particularly enriched by the lively notices from the Mississippi Market Bulletin, a biweekly published by the Mississippi Department of Agriculture that advertised everything from hogs to the bulbs and plants that hard-working farm women hoped to sell for "mad" money.

The books mentioned in "Natural Selections" are usually available from the Museum Shop of the American Museum of Natural History, (212) 769-5150.