What do you think?
Rate this book
Chasing Plants: Journeys with a Botanist through Rainforests, Swamps, and Mountains
A New Scientist Best Book of the Year
From an acclaimed botanist and artist, a thrilling and beautifully illustrated expedition around the globe in search of the world’s most extraordinary plants.
After making a strange discovery on a childhood trip to Ikea—a stand of sap-sucking, leafless broomrapes, stealing nutrients from their neighbors’ roots—Chris Thorogood dreamed of becoming a botanist and would stop at nothing to feed his growing addiction to plants. In his hair-raising adventures across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Thorogood treads a death-defying path over cliffs, up erupting volcanoes, through typhoons, and out into the very heart of the world’s vast, green wilderness. Along the way, he encounters pitcher plants, irises, and orchids more heart-piercingly beautiful than could ever be imagined.
But with Thorogood as our guide in Chasing Plants , we not only we see. An internationally acclaimed botanical illustrator, Thorogood conjures his adventures spent seed-collecting and conserving plants around the world back to life in his electric paintings, which feature throughout the book. They bring plants out of the shadows, challenging us to see their intrigue and their character, and helping us to understand why plant species must be protected. To join Thorogood in his wild adventures is to be cast under his green readers will never think of plants the same way again.
From an acclaimed botanist and artist, a thrilling and beautifully illustrated expedition around the globe in search of the world’s most extraordinary plants.
After making a strange discovery on a childhood trip to Ikea—a stand of sap-sucking, leafless broomrapes, stealing nutrients from their neighbors’ roots—Chris Thorogood dreamed of becoming a botanist and would stop at nothing to feed his growing addiction to plants. In his hair-raising adventures across Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, Thorogood treads a death-defying path over cliffs, up erupting volcanoes, through typhoons, and out into the very heart of the world’s vast, green wilderness. Along the way, he encounters pitcher plants, irises, and orchids more heart-piercingly beautiful than could ever be imagined.
But with Thorogood as our guide in Chasing Plants , we not only we see. An internationally acclaimed botanical illustrator, Thorogood conjures his adventures spent seed-collecting and conserving plants around the world back to life in his electric paintings, which feature throughout the book. They bring plants out of the shadows, challenging us to see their intrigue and their character, and helping us to understand why plant species must be protected. To join Thorogood in his wild adventures is to be cast under his green readers will never think of plants the same way again.
288 pages, Hardcover
Published September 12, 2022
19 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
Read
December 30, 2024You mean to tell me you can get paid to go climbing to find cool plants? Why didn’t I get a degree in that?
Read
February 1, 2023This book is written by the Deputy Director and Head of Science at Oxford University's Botanical Gardens. It is more of a travelogue that's laser-focused on plants, rather than a dedicated, fact-laden scientific manuscript. It covers the author's indefatigable trips, come rain or shine or geographical challenges, in pursuit of exploration and documentation of rare flora of the world. The author is infectious, exuberant, and electrifying in sharing his single-minded enthrallment and passion for plants. The book also showcases his beautiful botanical artwork. Also features more occurrences of the word "broomrake" than one could anticipate to encounter in a lifetime
October 31, 2022
An interesting book about finding plants in unusual locations, several in parking lots of all places, and searching for others across different countries. The plants are fascinating, both in appearance and their different ecosystems. Some are parasitic, some are rare or at least unusual. There are drawings and pictures, the story is interesting enough you don't skin very much. Then again I find plants fascinating, so...lol.
March 5, 2023
Do you love plants? Or maybe you love art? Or how about travel: do you love traveling to wild places on a personal quest for something? If you are intrigued by any of these propositions, then you simply must check out this splendiferous new book,
Chasing Plants: Journeys With A Botanist Through Rainforests, Swamps, And Mountains
(University of Chicago Press, 2022), by botanist, Chris Thorogood. Dr Thorogood is Deputy Director and Head of Science at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, where his research focuses on using molecular tools to explore the fundamental processes in plant evolutionary ecology. Most of his time is spent investigating host specificity in parasitic plants and how this can drive speciation, and examining the novel ecological processes that drive speciation in carnivorous Nepenthes pitcher plants.
Surprisingly, despite his credentials, Dr Thorogood never provides much detail about the natural history of the plants he’s seeking in this book, about his research nor what he is doing to conserve these rare plants that he clearly loves so much. Instead, this book is a travelogue that focuses on some of Dr Thorogood’s many adventures around the planet in search of fascinating, beautiful or rare wild plants. His goal? To paint these plants.
One might say Dr Thorogood is obsessed with plants. Actually, Dr Thorogood says Dr Thorogood is obsessed with plants:
Although he always loved plants as a child and had turned his bedroom into a small greenhouse crammed with plants of all sorts, it was the chance discovery of ‘a whole forest’ of sap-sucking, leafless common broomrapes, busily stealing nutrients from the roots of ornamental shrubbery next to an IKEA car park that planted the seed that ultimately changed his life: to pursue his single-minded passion to study carnivorous plants.
Now, as a full-fledged botanist, Dr Thorogood travels to many exotic floristic hotspots, including the Mediterranean Basin, Macaronesia, Southeast Asia, and Japan. He tells us of his struggles to reach rare plants. As his readers, we too dangle from cliffs, climb erupting volcanoes, endure typhoons, earthquakes and deadly landslides, and watch as he collects seeds from exotic plants so he can grow them in the lab, learn their ways, paint them.
An internationally acclaimed botanical illustrator, Dr Thorogood’s detailed hyperrealistic paintings bring these marvellous plants ‘out of the shadows’ where they can captivate even the most casual observer. And his paintings are glorious: a brilliantly colorful sawfly orchid that looks like it’s shouting gleefully (p 71). The parasitic Hydnora, ‘a coven of gaping, red-mouthed vampires’ with white fangs whose fist-like flower can punch through pavements and damage infrastructure (p. 79).
The book culminates with the author’s journey to Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu, the largest mountain in all of the Malay Archipelago. Home to a plethora of rare and beautiful plants, ranging from ferns to orchids to carnivorous pitcher plants, Mount Kinabalu is a botanical wonderland. It is a place of pilgrimage for botanists who, over the centuries, left a rich legacy in their personal collections and in the accounts of their adventures.
Astonishingly, Mount Kinabalu boasts more species of ferns than found in all of Africa. Further, many of the plants that live on this one mountain have only ever been collected — or seen — once. But pitcher plants is where Mount Kinabalu is unparalleled: it is home to a jungle bursting with pitcher plants, five species of which occur nowhere else. And these plants are especially impressive on Mount Kinabalu, with some species producing ‘pitchers the size of house cats.’
Sadly, two in five plant species are currently faced with extinction. How to conserve these botanical wonders? Dr Thorogood recognizes that botanists have a vital role to play in raising the public’s awareness of and appreciation for plants.
“We rely on them for our very existence: for food, clothes and medicines — and, as we’re discovering more and more, for our mental health and well-being.”
But plants have their own inherent value.
“We have a duty of care to conserve them — not just for future generations of people to enjoy — but because of their own intrinsic value and worth. As a botanist and artist, if I can help foster a greater care and attention for plants and their plight, even in some small way, then I am happy”, Dr Thorogood once told me last January (more here).
Maybe, as Dr Thorogood hopes, this book filled with his adventure and paintings will inspire future generations to also explore this world, to admire what they find, to protect these wonders that they may have only read and dreamt about in their youth, and to work to leave the world a better place.
NOTE: Originally published at Forbes.com on 28 November 2022.
Surprisingly, despite his credentials, Dr Thorogood never provides much detail about the natural history of the plants he’s seeking in this book, about his research nor what he is doing to conserve these rare plants that he clearly loves so much. Instead, this book is a travelogue that focuses on some of Dr Thorogood’s many adventures around the planet in search of fascinating, beautiful or rare wild plants. His goal? To paint these plants.
One might say Dr Thorogood is obsessed with plants. Actually, Dr Thorogood says Dr Thorogood is obsessed with plants:
“I’ve chased plants for as long as I can remember: I’ve learned the language of them, how to read the land with them and how to speak to its people through them. Knowing plants lets you see a place differently, read the forest’s mind, and listen to the mountain.
Once you’ve thought of something long and hard enough, you can’t unthink it. Right? Once you’ve hauled yourself up a wet mountainside in pursuit of a pitcher plant, macheted your way to that orchid, or divined the world’s largest flower in your mind’s eye, you have to do it for real, don’t you? Find them, whatever it takes. Get to know them, their haunts; bathe in their beauty.” (p. 15)
Although he always loved plants as a child and had turned his bedroom into a small greenhouse crammed with plants of all sorts, it was the chance discovery of ‘a whole forest’ of sap-sucking, leafless common broomrapes, busily stealing nutrients from the roots of ornamental shrubbery next to an IKEA car park that planted the seed that ultimately changed his life: to pursue his single-minded passion to study carnivorous plants.
Now, as a full-fledged botanist, Dr Thorogood travels to many exotic floristic hotspots, including the Mediterranean Basin, Macaronesia, Southeast Asia, and Japan. He tells us of his struggles to reach rare plants. As his readers, we too dangle from cliffs, climb erupting volcanoes, endure typhoons, earthquakes and deadly landslides, and watch as he collects seeds from exotic plants so he can grow them in the lab, learn their ways, paint them.
An internationally acclaimed botanical illustrator, Dr Thorogood’s detailed hyperrealistic paintings bring these marvellous plants ‘out of the shadows’ where they can captivate even the most casual observer. And his paintings are glorious: a brilliantly colorful sawfly orchid that looks like it’s shouting gleefully (p 71). The parasitic Hydnora, ‘a coven of gaping, red-mouthed vampires’ with white fangs whose fist-like flower can punch through pavements and damage infrastructure (p. 79).
The book culminates with the author’s journey to Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu, the largest mountain in all of the Malay Archipelago. Home to a plethora of rare and beautiful plants, ranging from ferns to orchids to carnivorous pitcher plants, Mount Kinabalu is a botanical wonderland. It is a place of pilgrimage for botanists who, over the centuries, left a rich legacy in their personal collections and in the accounts of their adventures.
Astonishingly, Mount Kinabalu boasts more species of ferns than found in all of Africa. Further, many of the plants that live on this one mountain have only ever been collected — or seen — once. But pitcher plants is where Mount Kinabalu is unparalleled: it is home to a jungle bursting with pitcher plants, five species of which occur nowhere else. And these plants are especially impressive on Mount Kinabalu, with some species producing ‘pitchers the size of house cats.’
Sadly, two in five plant species are currently faced with extinction. How to conserve these botanical wonders? Dr Thorogood recognizes that botanists have a vital role to play in raising the public’s awareness of and appreciation for plants.
“We rely on them for our very existence: for food, clothes and medicines — and, as we’re discovering more and more, for our mental health and well-being.”
But plants have their own inherent value.
“We have a duty of care to conserve them — not just for future generations of people to enjoy — but because of their own intrinsic value and worth. As a botanist and artist, if I can help foster a greater care and attention for plants and their plight, even in some small way, then I am happy”, Dr Thorogood once told me last January (more here).
Maybe, as Dr Thorogood hopes, this book filled with his adventure and paintings will inspire future generations to also explore this world, to admire what they find, to protect these wonders that they may have only read and dreamt about in their youth, and to work to leave the world a better place.
NOTE: Originally published at Forbes.com on 28 November 2022.
February 6, 2023
Interesting. The plants and travel stories are all interesting. The illustrations and paintings are gorgeous, but somewhat misleading. I wondered things like, "Is that mountain grey because it is devoid of vegetation or because it a style that allows you to see the plant in front of it?" These things really were not clear. The writing was decent, but the plants were definitely the centerpiece, despite not actually having that many plant pictures in the book. The whole thing felt like it should have been utterly delightful but didn't quite inspire my soul.
February 9, 2023
I’m not really sure why I didn’t like this book more than I did. I think I would have like more information about the plants rather than just the author’s excitement over seeing them. I just finished a book about a trek that was quite enigmatic, and it was intriguing. In Chasing Plants, I wasn’t always sure about the purpose of the trips, but it seemed more like an oversight on the author’s part than something that built intrigue. Yes, I did like learning about these plants and their habitats. I didn’t know that Borneo was a pitcher plant paradise. And the painting are exquisite.
March 21, 2023
3.5 stars. Uniquely engaging nonfiction essays, lightly woven together. The spectacular oil painting illustrations enhance the essays and mirror the style as well: minimal contextual elements but breathtaking in immediate detail. I found that I could only read a little at a time (like taking one good walk a day), but I enjoyed it greatly!
March 20, 2024
In het boek weet Chris Thorogood zijn fascinatie voor planten goed over te brengen. Je wilt na lezing zelf ook op plantenjacht! De reisverhalen zijn leuk en de tekeningen van de planten prachtig. Voor niet-botanici zou meer achtergrond over de natuurgebieden die hij bezoekt welkom zijn geweest.
January 12, 2025
Lushly descriptive of a plethora of plants, and the adventures it took the author to reach them.
March 19, 2025
If this book doesn’t want to make you hike up a mountain and hunt for plants, nothing will.
5 star orchids ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🪻
5 star orchids ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️🪻
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews