Telling Tales in Nature is a captivating and original compendium that brings together botany, storytelling, and Classical mythology in a beautifully illustrated volume. Collecting all four books of the series (Underworld Tales, Forest Tales, Orchard Tales, and Meadow Tales), the work offers an immersive and refreshing way of encountering Greek and Roman myths: through the voices of the plants themselves. This imaginative narrative choice, combined with accessible scholarship and botanical drawings, makes the collection both enchanting and educational, appealing equally to readers of mythology, nature writing, and literary retellings. At its core, the volume is an exploration of how ancient literature situated myth within the natural world. Rather than treating the landscape as mere backdrop, the book foregrounds the plants themselves, both as biological organisms and as mythopoetic agents, allowing them to narrate the stories to which they have long been symbolically tied. This technique resonates strongly with ancient ways of conceptualising the environment, in which trees, flowers, and cultivated plants were frequently personified or endowed with spirits. In adopting this perspective, the book invites contemporary readers to inhabit a worldview in which nature is animate, responsive, and woven into the cultural and religious imagination of antiquity.
The first books, Forest Tales, focusses on four trees linked in ancient sources to hamadryads: nymphs whose lives were bound to their associated trees. Greek and Roman authors often portrayed forests as inhabited, sentient spaces, and Forest Tales captures this sensibility by allowing the hamadryads’ trees to narrate the events of their own myths. Their stories highlight the delicate balance between human activity and the natural world, showing how the wellbeing of forests was imagined to be directly connected to divine or semi-divine presences. This section of the volume is particularly effective in showing readers how the mythic imagination could serve as an early form of environmental ethics, emphasising mutual dependence and the consequences of ecological harm. The journey continues with Orchard Tales, which introduces the remaining four hamadryad sisters, this time associated with orchard and vineyard plants. This part of the collection illuminates the intimate relationship between agriculture and mythology. Cultivated plants were not merely economic resources in antiquity; they were also entities embedded in stories, rituals, and symbolic systems. The narrating plant-spirits in Orchard Tales articulate the cultural significance of fruitfulness, seasonality, and human stewardship of the land. This section demonstrates how myth helped communities conceptualise the labour of cultivation not simply as physical work, but as part of a cosmic and ethical order as well. Thirdly, Underworld Tales leads the reader into the shadowed landscape of Hades, a realm where plants such as the pomegranate, mint, asphodel, and white poplar held distinctive symbolic and ritual significance. By permitting these plants to speak for themselves, the narratives acquire a distinctive intimacy, casting familiar myths from an unexpected vantage point. The pomegranate, for instance, does not merely feature as a prop in the story of Persephone, but becomes a witness to, and participant in, the drama of seasonal change and the cycle of death and rebirth. Likewise, the asphodel offers a perspective on ancient beliefs about the afterlife and the imagined ecology of the soul’s journey. Through these botanical narrators, Underworld Tales illuminates the profound extent to which ancient cultures used plant imagery to express ideas about mortality, transition, purification, and renewal. Finally, Meadow Tales turns to the bright, open spaces of fields, verges, gardens, and parks. The stories in this section are narrated by a diverse array of flower-spirits, whose delicate and often poignant tales range from the well known to the obscure. Flowers appear frequently in ancient storytelling, and their use as narrators brings a gentle, often humorous dimension to the myths. The shift to these lighter, more ephemeral voices allows Meadow Tales to close the collection with a sense of expansiveness, celebrating the beauty, fragility, and symbolism of blooms that have long captured human imagination.
One of the collection’s most carefully executed features is its structural design, which enhances both readability and scholarly value. Each chapter opens with a concise botanical introduction to the featured plant, summarising its physical characteristics, habitat, cultural associations, and role in classical literature. These introductions are accompanied by botanical drawings that provide visual grounding and offer readers a moment of observational stillness before entering the mythic narrative. The illustrations also reinforce one of the book’s central arguments: that understanding the natural properties of a plant deepens our appreciation of its literary and symbolic significance. Following this botanical preface, the myth itself is retold through the perspective of the plant’s spirit or nymph. This narrative strategy reframes familiar stories by shifting the focalisation away from gods and heroes to the natural elements that surround them. By adopting a voice that is, by definition, both marginal and omnipresent, the retellings draw attention to the overlooked botanical agents that structure many ancient narratives. At the close of each chapter, the author provides a set of concise scholarly notes that identify the classical sources behind each retelling, explain interpretative decisions, and clarify divergences from traditional versions. These notes significantly enhance the utility of the volume, making it a resource well suited not only to general readers but also to students, teachers, and practitioners of classical reception studies. With its evocative prose, meticulous scholarship, and beautiful illustrations, Telling Tales in Nature is both an engaging literary work and a thoughtful contribution to the study of classical reception. It encourages readers to reconsider well-known myths and to discover lesser-known ones through a nature-centred lens. More than a simple collection of retellings, it is an exploration of how stories grow out of landscapes and how the natural world continues to inspire human creativity. The volume will appeal not only to readers of mythology, but also to those interested in environmental humanities, nature writing, and the cultural histories of plants. Ultimately, it invites readers to look more closely at the plants around them and to imagine the ancient stories that might still whisper through their leaves.
Open access
