PLANT-BASED READING
To mark the beginning of spring, we’re celebrating all that germinates, sprouts, blossoms and fruits with an exciting selection of books to get gardeners reaching for their spades – including a Palestinian cookbook to inspire delicious meals from the resulting harvest. Whether you nurture a patch of land or simply forage, you’ll find tips on guerilla gardening and permaculture, fresh thoughts on reciprocal plant relationships, a fresh take on a much-maligned weed and a dose of the uncanny from a master storyteller.
March 2026
Non Fiction
Tiny Gardens Everywhere by Kate Brown
A celebration of the power of small acts of care and creativity, the acclaimed historian Kate Brown’s exploration of urban gardening is a timely reminder that for centuries, all across the world, ordinary people have transformed overlooked corners of their communities into oases of nourishing vegetation. To Brown, allotments, guerilla gardens and small plots of land carved from the urban wilderness are symbols of resilience, resistance, community, and environmental awareness. A manifesto for the next food revolution, Tiny Gardens Everywhere highlights how local action can inspire wider renewal – and why urban micro-farming is an important, if overlooked source of free food.
The Man Who Planted Trees by Jim Robbins
“When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago. The second best time? Today.”—Chinese proverb
One day, David Milarch, a Michigan nurseryman derailed by alcoholism, had a near-death experience from which he emerged with the conviction that human life was in jeopardy because trees were dying. The solution, he understood, was to clone the champion trees of the world—the largest, the hardiest, the ones that had survived millennia and were most resilient to climate change—and create a kind of Noah’s ark of tree genetics. Twenty years later, his team had successfully cloned some of the world’s oldest trees including giant redwoods and sequoias, and grown seedlings from the oldest tree in the world, the bristlecone pine Methuselah. Milarch’s absorbing story, masterfully told by New York Times journalist Jim Robbins, is a moving account of one man’s mission to protect the forests that are essential to human survival.
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Gifts and Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer
As Indigenous scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests Serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the Serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of interconnectedness and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival.
As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
The Garden Awakening: Designs to nurture our land and ourselves by Mary Reynolds
In this beautifully written and illustrated book, award-winning garden designer Mary Reynolds encourages us to restore the health and energy of our land. Drawing inspiration from permaculture traditions as well as the ancient multi-tiered approach of forest gardening, this book covers both the artistic and practical aspects of creating a magical garden that is an expanding, living, interconnected ecosystem.
The Garden Awakening is both art and inspiration for any garden lover seeking to create a positive and natural space while incorporating sustainable living such as growing your own food. It combines practical step-by-step instructions with spiritual, ancient Celtic stories to help you awaken any garden space, nurturing it to benefit both land and people. This approach allows ecosystems to be in balance while providing a space and nourishment for humans beings.
Boustany: A celebration of vegetables from my Palestine by Sami Tamimi
Boustany translates from Arabic as ‘My Garden’, and this book is flavour-packed with colourful and simple vegetable-based dishes reflecting the down-to-earth, relaxed and plentiful cooking that Tamimi grew up eating – platters of aubergine and chickpeas with a spicy green lemon sauce and fragrant lentil fatteh that always tasted better the next day. These are the dishes he has known, loved, cooked and shared with friends.
With over 100 recipes including breakfast, sharing plates, big celebrations, simple breads, moreish sweet treats and easy dinners, this cookbook is strongly grounded in Palestinian cuisine, from building your mooneh, or pantry, by preserving seasonal vegetables and herbs to lining the dinner table with a variety of salads and condiments reflective of a love for fresh and vibrant food.
FICTION
Area X by Jeff VanderMeer
Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, beginning with the iconic trilogy, Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance, and extending to the fourth volume, Absolution, is an immersive, often disturbing exploration of the unknowable forces of nature, and humanity’s inability to understand and govern them. In evoking the uncanniness of plant and animal life in the mysterious nature reserve-cum-force-field known as Area X, VanderMeer offers a nuanced encounter with a universe that is simultaneously beautiful, horrifying, and transformative. This collection that cements his status as one of the most innovative writers of contemporary speculative literature.
Albion by Anna Hope
The Brooke family are gathering in their eighteenth-century ancestral home to bury Philip: husband, father and the blinding sun around which they have all orbited for as long as they can remember.
With the family split over the future of the estate – dreams of rewilding and a last line of defence against the coming climate catastrophe or a treetop haven for the super-rich – the arrival of Clara, shrouded in secrets, brings with her a truth that will fracture all the dreams on which they’ve built their lives.
‘Anna Hope uses the contested ground of an English estate to ask who gets to decide the future of land in an age of ecological crisis.’ – Kit de Waal, Climate Fiction Prize judge
Dusk by Robbie Arnott
An explosive novel of the wild, and the lengths humans will go to control it.
With escaped Puma, Dusk, roaming the distant highlands, outcast twins Iris and Floyd decide to join the hunt.
As they journey up into the wild, haunted country, they discover there’s far more to the land and people than they imagined. Forced to make an uneasy alliance with a fellow tracker, the twins’ lifelong bond is put at risk. And as the trio close in on their prey, it becomes clear where the true danger lies . . .
‘A climate Western about two outcasts siblings, a displaced animal-world and a scorched environment which explores our relationship to nature, and is filled to the brim with jeopardy.’ – Arifa Akbar, Climate Fiction Prize Chair
CHILDREN’S BOOKS
The Magic and Mystery of Trees by Jen Green
From towering branches to the tangled roots beneath the soil, this fact-packed book illustrates for young readers how every part of a tree plays a vital role—not just in its own survival, but in the health of the whole forest. The Magic and Mystery of Trees showcases tree species from around the world, as well as the creatures that depend on these vital ecosystems. And best of all, kids will find out how they can help—starting with planting a tree of their own.
Poem of the Month
We Didn’t Stop Being Wild in the First Place
by Jane Murray Bird
If your garden grew a plant that won you fat
glossy rosettes, coffee, wine, drugs, and chic
bistro salads nine months a year between the
paving slabs whether you coaxed it or not,
wouldn’t you drop to your knees and touch
your forehead to the driveway, kiss the lion’s
tooth and wet the bed with joy, sappy as pop?
Wouldn’t you blow off the clock, tell the time
you want to leave your job and get filamentous
achenes tattooed on your wrist instead? The neighbours
sigh and say I have gone to seed, but I never had the plot.
Jane Murray Bird studied creative writing with the Open University in Scotland. Her work has appeared in magazines including Hippocampus, Magma, Mslexia, Under the Radar and Prole. She lives by the sea in Edinburgh.
Contact our Librarian if you would like themed book lists to support teaching about climate change.
We’re always looking for ideas for books to add to our growing collection of literature on the climate and nature crisis. If would like to share ideas, please get in touch! Contact mattroselibrary@gmail.com.