If any of you have followed my writing for long, you’ll know I bestow a grim power on plants. As nature’s first recipients of the Sun’s eroding energy they become destroyers of worlds. Before land animals evolved plants contributed to a mass extinction of almost all sea life. As Gavin Maxwell opined in the wonderful Ring of Bright Water: ‘there is always something a little stifling in this enveloping green stain’. English naturalist John Ray (1627-1705) is attributed to saying ‘Beauty is power; ...