HORTUS CURIOUS: DISCOVER THE WORLD’S MOST WEIRD AND WONDERFUL PLANTS AND FUNGI

Dorling Kindersley, £16.99 ISBN 978-0241561553

This plant book with a difference aims to instill a sense of curiosity in the plant blind and bring the wonders of botany to new audiences.

Reviewer Jane Perrone is a freelance writer and podcaster.

One glance at the shocking pink cover and it is glaringly obvious that Hortus Curious is not your average plant book. Perhaps we need a shock.

Plant blindness – or plant awareness disparity, as it is also known – is a serious and growing issue: one survey found that 82 per cent of British children could not identify an oak leaf.

Hortus Curious is aimed at people who would be unlikely to pick up a regular plant book, introducing them to 40 charismatic plants and fungi, from cotton and cacao to the carnivorous Venus flytrap and the squirting cucumber, which gets its name from its explosive, seedspreading fruits. The book is arranged into chapters that include Plants Behaving Badly and Superheroes, designed to entice even the greatest plant sceptic to dip into its pages. Watercolourist Aaron Apsley’s pictures bring the words to life beautifully, offering accurate illustrations that reminded me of some of my favourite plant books from my childhood in the 1970s and 80s.

Hortus Curious is certainly in the author’s wheelhouse. Michael Perry, via his alter ego Mr Plant Geek, is often to be found dispensing plant knowledge on daytime television, including the shopping channel QVC, and on social media.

Perry’s presenting experience shows in his writing.

The book is squarely aimed at the gift market, and its writing style is very casual and conversational – I have to admit that the editor in me winced at a sentence starting with the word ‘Okay’.

However, readers who find more traditional plant books too intimidating (or indeed dull) may well be drawn in.

This certainly happened in my house: I left a copy of

Hortus Curious on the dining room table and came back to find my 12-year-old son avidly turning the pages. He soon began telling me about the biggest flower in the world and an orchid that looks like a duck.