Where The Wildflowers Grow

Leif Bersweden Hodder & Stoughton £20 ★★★★★

The term ‘plant blindness’ was coined in the 1990s to describe modern humans’ inability to notice the plants in their vicinity. Botanist Leif Bersweden, it’s fair to say, has 20-20 vision, having fallen in love with plants as a boy growing up in Wiltshire. In his amiable new book he goes on the hunt for the most exciting wildflowers of Britain and Ireland, travelling by bike as he combs the land for its treasures.

You’ll learn a lot. Bersweden is as enchanted by weirder species – the carnivorous bladderwort, for instance, which he finds floating in a fen in Norfolk – as he is by commoners that even hard-boiled urbanites could probably identify.

The daisy, he reveals, is so named because Anglo-Saxons called it the Day’s Eye, as it closes up at night. Bluebell woods, now a magnet for influencers, were once raided by Elizabethans who crimped their ruffs with the bulbs; and earlier, by monks who used bluebells to treat snake bites. The butterbur shrub flowers before it produces leaves, which explains its wonderful folk name, ‘sonafore-the-father’.

Other plants are as charmingly christened: we meet thunder flowers, laughter bringers, goldy knobs of Oxfordshire, burnt orchids.

There are moments when Bersweden’s perkiness grates. He doesn’t eat, he ‘wolfs’; he doesn’t walk, he

‘scampers’. The best way to ‘build a connection’ with a plant, he says, is to prostate yourself before it and to view it from plant height. He presents himself, flatteringly, as an irrepressible maverick who’s constantly having to explain his botanising to a plodding public: when he finds a cool flower growing near the Ministry of Justice, for instance, a nasty security guard tells him to clear off.

Still, on the whole it’s a delightful, soothing book, packed with enlightening information about the natural world and the threats it faces.