I was expecting a book on the history of taxonomy for plants and what I got was a bunch of brief biographies on mostly medieval, mostly German, herbalists who had printed various volumes listing plants. There is very little in the way of discussion about how the plants are named or organized. It should have been titled A History of Publications About Plants. ( )

The extent of my awareness of the naming of plants a few weeks ago was 'Isn't that something to do with Linnaeus?'. Well, this book has put me right in a big way. Linnaeus features only in the epilogue: the main body of the story takes the reader from a Greek, Theophrastus, in the fourth century BC to John Ray, an Englishman of the seventeenth century AD, in the search for the best way to classify plants. It sounds like a dry subject, but the personalities, struggles and inter-relationships of the key players are beautifully portrayed, with room for the personality of the author to permeate the text too. This work is scholarly and accessible and sumptuously illustrated with coloured depictions of plants, maps and portraits. A treasure of a volume. ( )

Great book! Amazing illustrations.
The author is very good at telling a long history of over 2000 years on how the modern standard taxonomy was created for all plants and all living things.
For some reason Anna Pavord likes to divide all the historical characters in "good guys" and "bad guys". May be it is true, but sometime reading the book I got the impression of watching an Hollywood movie. As in every respectable film, the good guys at the end will prevail.

The battle is not yet over! Take a look at Wikipedia (I'm talking about the English version) and you will see that the scientific notation is not used as a standard way to name plants. For reason I completely ignore Americans still prefer the ambiguous local notation over the scientific one (not surprisingly, they still discussing about creationism...). ( )