Top Five Saturday: Books About Plants and Flowers

The core image and monument at the centre of this sort of setting is for me not Eden (neither Biblical nor Miltonic) – although there are always going to be resonances and echoes of it in any woodland setting. But those descriptions always feel a little managed, curated, tamed. Like the Marvell.

But Shakespeare’s woods – Arden, Birnam Wood, the happy hollow of the oak tree in which Edgar does “elf my hair” in King Lear – and iconically the woodlands around Athens governed by Titania and Oberon where the very weather is a reflection of their whimsy and mood – Shakespeare’s transformative, magical wild woods are the epitome that all these books carry like a ghost.

This is one of those novels that genuinely changes the way you look at the world – the mystery and majesty of trees and forests…

“An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. An Air Force crewmember in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan.

“This is the story of these and five other strangers, each summoned in different ways by the natural world, who are brought together in a last stand to save it from catastrophe.”

A fun apocalyptic novel with a conservationist message and a dark, transformative magic running through it.

What would you do if, overnight, trees burst through the ground, the tarmac, the buildings of the world…?

“Adrien Thomas has never been much of a hero. But when he realises that no help is coming, he ventures into this unrecognisable world. Alongside green-fingered Hannah and her teenage son Seb, Adrien sets out to find his wife and to discover just how deep the forest goes. Their journey will take them to a place of terrible beauty and violence, to the dark heart of nature and the darkness inside themselves.”

Anything by Frances Hardinge is going to be wonderful, and this features a wonderfully dark tree which can absorb our lies and reward us with a fruit that reveals a truth – the bigger the lie, the bigger the truth revealed.

“Faith’s father has been found dead under mysterious circumstances, and as she is searching through his belongings for clues she discovers a strange tree. The tree only grows healthy and bears fruit if you whisper a lie to it. The fruit of the tree, when eaten, will deliver a hidden truth to the person who consumes it. The bigger the lie, the more people who believe it, the bigger the truth that is uncovered.

There are not enough superlatives to describe this: uncanny, folkloric, beautiful, important…

“Not far from London, there is a village.

“This village belongs to the people who live in it and to those who lived in it hundreds of years ago. It belongs to England’s mysterious past and its confounding present.

“It belongs to families dead for generations, and to those who have only recently moved here, such as the boy Lanny, and his mum and dad.

“But it also belongs to Dead Papa Toothwort, who has woken from his slumber in the woods. Dead Papa Toothwort, who is listening to them all.”

Gloriously painfully honest and realistic and mythic at the same time, A Monster Calls is a wonderful tribute to Siobhan Dowd, to cancer sufferers, to cancer survivors everywhere – and the monstrous yew tree that comes calling for Conor O’Malley with the wildness of stories at his leafy fingertips…

“Conor has the same dream every night, ever since his mother first fell ill, ever since she started the treatments that don’t quite seem to be working. But tonight is different. Tonight, when he wakes, there’s a visitor at his window. It’s ancient, elemental, a force of nature. And it wants the most dangerous thing of all from Conor. It wants the truth.”