With more than two hundred editions, Gilbert White's The Natural History of Selborne is one of the most published books in the English language. An environmental study of the eighteenth-century Hampshire parish where White was born and later served as curate, the book is distinguished by the author's meticulous observations of plant and animal life--the -minute particulars---and his uncanny sense of their interdependence. His book is both the definitive expression of the English love for countryside and a cornerstone of all environmental writing.

In this Whitbread...

" A] witty and beguiling meditation on weeds and their wily ways....You will never look at a weed, or flourish a garden fork, in the same way again."
--Richard Holmes, author of The Age of Wonder

"In this fascinating, richly detailed book, Richard Mabey gives weeds their full due."
--Carl Zimmer, author of Evolution

Richard Mabey, Great Britain's Britain's "greatest living nature writer" (London Times), has written a stirring and passionate defense of nature's most unloved plants. Weeds is a fascinating, eye-opening, and vastly...

The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the renowned naturalist Richard Mabey.

A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as...