Where the Wildflowers Grow: Shortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Award

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The scarlet opportunist, an annual that turns up wherever soil is disturbed, its seeds lying dormant until the day comes A father who cheats, a mother who is not satisfied, a son just on the verge of becoming a teenager and a sixteen year old daughter who has fallen in love and discovered sex. The secrets straining the family begin to fester having unexpected consequences. TIP: Lots of wildflower seed mixes include yellow rattle seed. Yellow rattle is parasitic to grass, so will stop grass from growing, giving your wildflower meadow a much better chance of establishing. I really liked this, not only is he really knowledgeable, but what comes across is his enthusiasm. It is infectious to reading this makes me want to go and discover what is out in my local patch! He is utterly besotted by plants and this is evident in his prose and the pictures included in his book of him, especially when he gets to hold a bladderwort.

I completely adore this book, to the point where finishing it has both encompassed me in joy and made me unbearably sad about the fact that I will never again read it for the first time.

This talk, like the book, is all about the joy of engaging with nature, the importance of plants for our climate, and celebrating our unbelievable botanical diversity. Leif's publisher was kind enough to send me a proof copy of this book - exactly a year to the day before I finished reading - thank you! It's taken me a while to get to this one (you don't want to see the various teetering TBR piles scattered around my room) but I am so so glad that I finally did.

Now a botanist, Leif decides to go on a mission, to explore the plants that Britain and Ireland have to offer and to meet those who spend time searching for them. Over the course of a year, Leif goes on a journey around the UK and Ireland, highlighting the unique plants that grow there, their history and the threats that face them. His journey takes him from the Cornish coast to the pine forests of Scotland – even to the streets of London, proving that nature can be found in the most unexpected places. Along the way, Leif highlights the joy and positivity that can be found through understanding nature and why it is so desperately important to protect our wildflowers. I received ‘Where the Wildflowers Grow’ by Vera Jane Cook via Goodreads in exchange for an honest review.The Wildflowers of Britain have a new champion. Read Leif's lyrical and passionate tribute to them and be cured of your plant blindness." A medium-height buttercup of compacted grassland, readily identifiable from its reflexed sepals under each shining bloom

Big blue, white or violet flowers on a handsome plant, one of the signatures of midsummer in limestone grassland and verges An opportunist in cleared ground, producing its water-filled leaves and softly tactile, lilac-ringed, egg-shaped blooms in late summer The structure of the book as an ongoing journey was excellent. Each chapter focuses on a particular place and plant or habitat and it creates a good flow that keeps the reader interested but not overwhelmed.

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Shady hedgerows in May foam with the green and white of this familiar umbellifer, now a show-garden must-have England’s glory in May, forming massed displays in ancient woods. The pendulous flowers hang distinctively on one side. Gardening writer and regular Country Life contributor Steven Desmond named this as his favourite wildlower ‘because it’s especially British, everyone knows it and it adorns our ancient woods each spring.’ The little clumps of bacon-and-eggs in rough limestone pasture are a sign that other floral beauties are nearby Leif recently completed a genetics PhD at Kew Gardens and is the author of The Orchid Hunter (2017) and Where the Wildflowers Grow (2022). Conscious that facts are only half the story, the emotional part of the book varies from overly reserved when it comes to his relationships with people to overly exuberant when it comes to his relationship with plants. It's as if all of his buttoned up Englishness just can't wait to burst free into this eccentric, joyful and endearing pastime.

On the way he cycles or takes the train to meet up with botanists and conservationists. They reflect on the many other benefits of plant hunting, as well as the sad decline of great swathes of natural habitat. I think this will be a story that I can reread again and again because of the fluidity of the writing and the overall storyline. You learn a lot about the prejudice that happened years ago and how the characters learn to evolve through all of it throughout their lives into adulthood. If I could give this book more than five stars than I would and I can not wait to start in on another Vera Jane Cook novel that I am sure will delight me just as much as these last two have! Flowering shyly by the woodland edge, this familiar plant’s little stars of blue and pink are known to every dog-walker Conservation features heavily in this book. There was barely a chapter that went by without mention of degraded or disappearing habitats, climate change, shrinking populations and changes to biodiversity. And that is how it should be. Organisms do not exist in isolation and especially now humans need to act and realise how much harm we are doing to our planet. Everything deserves a chance and a place to exist, even if it doesn't benefit us as a species (though usually nature does). Dalton, who as a thirteen year old boy believed a few lies, doing what he had to, to protect his sister. His sense of understanding had lead him on several wrong paths, but at the end he turned out to be a well adjusted man. These struggles continued throughout his adult life, where he became a Priest and teacher.You need to create a fine top layer of soil to sow the seeds. So clear the ground of any existing vegetation you don’t want to keep, to create areas of bare soil where you can sow. Honestly, though, this is a lovely book written by a person who earnestly loves plants. In a country with so little nature left and so little endemic biodiversity, this is particularly endearing.