Botany

What we owe to the self-taught genius Carl Linnaeus

13 April 2024 9:00 am

Bumptious, uncouth and the despair of his schoolmasters, Linnaeus died almost forgotten. Yet he established a system of taxonomy that we still use two centuries later

The world’s largest flower is also its ugliest

30 March 2024 9:00 am

Known as ‘corpse flower’, the sinister Rafflesia resembles slabs of bloody, white-flecked meat, emits the scent of rotting flesh and eventually subsides into a mass of black slime

The best of this year’s gardening books

4 November 2023 9:00 am

Authors reviewed include Jinny Blom on design, Jenny Joseph on scented plants, Maury C. Flannery on herbaria and Francis Pryor on his Fenland haven

In search of the peripatetic philosopher Theophrastus

20 August 2022 9:00 am

Publishers lately seem to have got the idea that otherwise uncommercial subjects might be rendered sexy if presented with a…

We could all once tell bird’s-foot trefoil from rosebay willowherb

2 July 2022 9:00 am

‘There are a great many ways of holding on to our sanity amid the vices and follies of the world,’…

A guide to the apothecary’s garden

29 January 2022 9:00 am

On 23 May 1804, two months before his daughter’s wedding, John Coakley Lettsom threw open his estate in Camberwell. Some…

Every page of this astonishingly beautiful ode to the citrus is a treat

19 December 2020 9:00 am

Laura Freeman is transported by J.C. Volkamer’s astonishingly beautiful ode to the citrus

Flower power: symbols of romance and revolution

2 May 2020 9:00 am

Critics have argued over the meaning of the great golden flower head to which Van Dyck points in his ‘Self-Portrait…

The forgotten masterpieces of Indian art

21 December 2019 9:00 am

As late as the end of the 18th century, only a handful of Europeans had ever seen the legendary Mughal…

The bee orchid, by Franz Andreas Bauer. Its sex life is far beyond the dreams of most teenage boys

Hunt the lady’s slipper

21 October 2017 9:00 am

Who would want to read a whole book about a teenage boy’s gap year? When most 18-year-olds take time off…

‘Spray’, by Harold Williamson (1939)

Nothing is quite what it seems

19 August 2017 9:00 am

One day, somebody will stage an exhibition of artists taught at the Slade by the formidable Henry Tonks, who considered…

Seeds of a mystery in a great-aunt’s will

27 June 2015 9:00 am

There is something cruelly beautiful, delightfully frustrating and filthily gorgeous about a Scarlett Thomas novel. Two family trees open and…

Raspberry and quince by Sarah Simblet

Warning: the beautiful trees in this book may very soon be extinct

31 May 2014 9:00 am

John Evelyn (1620–1706) was not only a diarist. He was one of the most learned men of his time: traveller,…

Germaine Greer's mad, passionate quest to heal Australia

8 February 2014 9:00 am

Like an old woman in a fairy story, Germaine Greer, now in her late seventies, has taken to lurking in…

Pine by Laura Mason; Lily, by Marcia Reiss - review

21 September 2013 9:00 am

After the success of their animal series of monographs, Reaktion Books have had the clever idea of doing something similar…