The Plant Messiah

240pp, Viking, £16.99, ebook £9.99

Magdalena calls himself the “Plant Messiah”, and his evangelical mission is to save endangered species: a tea-cup-sized waterlily found only in a Rwandan swamp; a Mauritian plant pollinated by a rare gecko. Magdalena’s intuition as a propagator is uncanny

– a bubbling pot of tortellini inspires him to feed his ailing seedlings carbon dioxide – but more detail on species evolving to save themselves would have been nice, too. Richard Mabey