Book 54: Wicked Plants

I love Amy Stewart's writing. She tells great stories about gardening, worms, and the cut flower business in From the Ground Up, The Earth Moved, and Flower Confidential.

In Wicked Plants, though, she just gives us a few paragraphs or even less about each plant. She doesn't really have time to engage me.




The plants she describes are poisonous, annoying, invasive, hallucinogenic, and stinky. A few times, she tells us a little story about a bad plant, and her voice really comes through. But too often she just reports the facts, which isn't fun enough. I could read a field guide instead.

The book is gorgeous, with pretty etchings of the plants (but also with ugly, childish illustrations of plants doing harm). Its pages are stained as if it's an old book. There's a ribbon attached to mark your place. Cute, cute, cute.

I felt disappointed by the brief descriptions. Stewart's strength lies in teaching facts while storytelling and entertaining. But she needs more than a couple paragraphs on a topic to make it work.