Advertisement

The next best thing to seeing plants is reading about them - and these books don't disappoint

A blossoming ghost orchid - www.alamy.com
A blossoming ghost orchid - www.alamy.com

Most of us, I hope, would agree that plants are just the most wonderful things. And that although it’s hard to beat looking at beautiful plants, or even better growing them, reading about plants and the people who love them is pretty good too. Which is why the past year has been such a treat, with not one but two books from two of our most celebrated plant lovers: Peter Marren and Roy Lancaster.

Roy Lancaster’s My Life With Plants does exactly what it says on the tin – a canter through a life spent growing, admiring, searching for, and writing and talking about plants. In short, a life well spent, and you get the impression Lancaster wouldn’t want to change a minute of it. Peter Marren’s book, in contrast, is about a single year in his life, searching for the last 50 British wild plants that had previously eluded him. Its title, Chasing the Ghost, refers to the ghost orchid, Epipogium aphyllum, by common consent Britain’s most elusive wild flower.

The two books don’t sound all that similar, yet they both begin in much the same way, with a book. In Lancaster’s case with Flora of Bolton (his home town), in Marren’s case with the Rev Keble Martin’s Concise British Flora, the first book to bring colour pictures of wildflowers to the general public.

Roy Lancaster takes readers on a journey through a lifetime spent searching out plants - Credit: MMGI/Marianne Majerus
Roy Lancaster takes readers on a journey through a lifetime spent searching out plants Credit: MMGI/Marianne Majerus

Both authors love ticking things off a list, and in Lancaster’s book there’s a wonderful picture of a page of the Flora of Bolton with his annotations. As gardeners, we associate Lancaster’s name with garden plants and exotic locations like the Himalayas, but like many plant lovers his passion began at home. I defy you to read his description of an early trip to Silverdale (“a name… akin to that of the Elven Kingdom of Lothlorien in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings”) without feeling an urge to catch a train there right now.

A riveting odyssey, with appalling weather, near-death experiences and also sublime moments

In Marren’s case, it was the realisation that he had ticked off all but 50 of our (possibly) native plants in his battered copy of the Concise British Flora that gave him the idea for “The Quest”: to find all the missing 50, in a single year. There follows a riveting odyssey, with appalling weather and near-death experiences, but also sublime moments and many meetings with friends (plant and human) old and new. Many of the plants he sought are inconspicuous to the point of invisibility, which is one reason they had previously escaped him. For example, the tiny strapwort: “Our small colony contained perhaps a quarter of all the strapworts in Britain. You could fit the entire population on a kitchen table and still have room for the plates.”

strapwort (Corrigiola litoralis), blooming - Credit: Alamy
strapwort (Corrigiola litoralis), blooming Credit: Alamy

But time and again Marren is surprised by the beauty he finds: “Strapwort, to my surprise, is quite nice… crimson bracts [and] little green stars.” He was even “entranced” by pedunculate sea-purslane, which takes some doing.

Another surprising convergence between the two books is the ghost orchid, a plant of almost mythical unpredictability, and so rare that it has been officially declared extinct in Britain – at almost the same moment that it unexpectedly turned up again. In short a plant that any keen botanist or gardener would give quite a lot to see. Did either of our heroes ever succeed in seeing one? To find out, get both books on your summer reading list now, or even quicker if you have a birthday coming up.

 

Reader offer

My Life With Plants by Roy Lancaster (Filbert Press, £25) and Chasing the Ghost by Peter Marren (Square Peg, £16.99) can be ordered for £20 and £14.99 respectively, plus p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk