Introduction

Summary

People cannot survive without plants. We rely on them for food, shelter, clothes, tools – as much now as we ever did before modernity. Our relationship with plants predated the emergence of written language: that history is archaeological. But as long as we have had the words to write we have written about plants: that writing is the subject of this book. The history of literature about plants is long, rich, and varied: the task of accounting for it would demand many volumes. Nonetheless, this collection is ambitious in scope. Its sections cover historical periods of Greek, Latin, Norse, and Anglophone plant literatures; prominent modern plant genres, and the plant writing of most global regions. The scholars who took on the difficult task of accounting for a region’s plant literature have done so with elegance, many of them focusing on the long history of literature about a single plant species whose place in the region’s culture deserves attention for its sustained national, religious, or ethnic importance.