Botany

If you have ever pinched the tip out of a fuchsia to make it bushy, hardened off seedlings before planting them out, or cursed a row of lettuces that shot up into flower in a hot spell, you have already done a fair amount of botany. You just haven’t had the names for it. This book gives you the names, and the reasons behind them.

Botany is the study of what plants are made of, how they work, how they reproduce and how they are related. For a gardener, it is the difference between following rules and understanding them. Rules are useful until a plant does something the rule didn’t mention; understanding lets you look at a yellowing leaf, a lopsided seedling or a holly with no berries and work out what is going on.

What you’ll discover

• Cells, growing points, and why pinching out and hard pruning work as they do
• Roots, stems and leaves, including bulbs, corms, tubers, tendrils and bracts mistaken for petals
• Photosynthesis, respiration and light, with a plain explanation of daily light integral
• How plants move water, what wilting really means, and sensible watering rules
• Nutrients, soil, pH and deficiency symptoms, plus mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria
• Plant hormones, rooting cuttings, ripening fruit and why seedlings lean towards the window
• Day length, winter cold and dormancy, and why crops bolt
• Flowers and pollination, seeds, fruits, life cycles, F1 hybrids and inheritance
• Plant defences, poisonous plants, how diseases get in, and some unusual ways of making a living
• Plant families, how botanical names work and why they change, plus simple home experiments

A book without pictures

There are deliberately no illustrations: the best picture of a plant is the plant. Each structure is described alongside something you can find today. A Brussels sprout shows you what a bud looks like inside, an onion cut in half shows you a bulb, and an apple sliced across its middle reveals a five-pointed star that tells you how the fruit was built. A kitchen knife, a chopping board and a magnifying glass will take you a long way, and a chapter of observations and experiments shows you what to look at, each with its own safety note.

Who it’s for

It is written for gardeners, students and curious beginners. Every technical term is explained when it first appears, there is a glossary, and a troubleshooting appendix links common garden symptoms to their botanical causes. The chapters build on one another but also stand alone, so a worry about yellowing tomato leaves is a perfectly respectable place to start.

Seasonal examples are for the UK and similar temperate climates, with advice to shift timings by about six months in the Southern Hemisphere, where sunny windows face north. Where reputable guides disagree, on nutrient numbers, seed chilling temperatures or even whether a rose has thorns or prickles, the book says where the disagreement lies and what it means in practice. Poisonous plants are flagged for people and pets, with clear emergency advice.

It won’t stop your lettuces bolting in a heatwave, but it will tell you why they did, and what to sow next time.