Vanishing Landscapes The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them

About this book

In the past, we were deeply bound to all things green and growing. We once knew the landscape and the plants around us as well as we knew ourselves. But today our relationship with plants and nature has grown distant – we have lost a sense of plants as precious.

Vanishing Landscapes tells the story of how plants disappeared from our daily lives one by one. First were apples, then household medicines like saffron, cloth dyes like woad, grapes for making wine, and then, eventually, the timber and reeds we used to build our houses and the wheat we grew for our bread. In their place came the first corporation, the first factory, the banking system, private property, global trade, and modern medicine.

The history of these plants shows us how we became modern, but it also shows a path to recover some of what we have lost. In Vanishing Landscapes, Bonnie Lander Johnson goes in search of the old life and the people who are still connected to the land. She meets farmers in Ireland, wine makers in Yorkshire and cloth dyers in the Highlands. She cuts reeds in the watery Norfolk fens and camps overnight in a West Country orchard to gaze up at an unchanging sky.

Vanishing Landscapes brings to life a world we never knew but still long for, and reminds us that it's not too late to find a way back.

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Biography

Bonnie Lander Johnson is a Fellow and Associate Professor at Downing College, Cambridge University, where she teaches the literature and history of the early modern period and represents the University on the BBC/Cambridge National Short Story Award. Her academic books include Botanical Culture and Popular Belief in Shakespeare's England (Cambridge University Press), The Cambridge Handbook to Literature and Plants, Chastity in Early Stuart Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press) and Blood Matters (University of Pennsylvania Press). Bonnie is also a fiction and non-fiction writer. Her work has appeared in Hinterland, The Belfast Review, Howl and Dappled Things, and her fiction has been shortlisted for The Royal Society of Literature's V. S. Pritchett Prize and The Brick Lane Bookshop Short Story Prize.