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Anna Pavord (Bloomsbury, £14.99)

We owe a lot to plants, and over the ages man has investigated the plant kingdom to harvest its resources for our benefit. It has always been important to correctly identify plants, especially as the extracts of some are good for medicine, whilst others will poison you if you eat them. Pavord’s fascinating account tells the history of the identification, naming and classification of plants over the hundreds of years that it took to sort out. Her story takes us from Athens in the third century BC, where we meet Theophrastus, the writer of the first book about plants, and learn of his contribution, all the way up to the work of John Ray, an English plantsman and scholar whose Synopsis Methodica (1690) was a distillation of his lifetime’s search for order in the natural world. Pavord claims that it was John Ray who truly established the study of plants as a scientific discipline. In between, we meet the key characters and are treated to the author’s excellent writing style, her sense of history, and lots of good anecdotes.

The book is a mixture of genres: part travelogue; partly a number of potted biographies of the key characters in the story. There is also something of Pavord’s own life in here; and it’s a bit of a mystery story, not only revealing the findings like peeling back the layers of an onion, but classifying the onion, too.

Fans of Pavord should be aware that this is a paperback reissue of her earlier hardback, which was called The Naming of Names when it was published in 2005, so just check your bookshelf before buying.

Pavord moves the story on a little in the epilogue, but gives scant information about the current state of play, for the debate continues still. Her endpoint is the start of the scientific work, so perhaps she plans a sequel, which I am sure would be every bit as interesting as this volume.