Flowering Earth

"Even a diehard urbanite would likely be seduced by this extraordinary chronicle of the plant kingdom . . . " --Publishers Weekly

" . . . much more than the fascinating story of plant life . . . It is also a book about the resilience of life itself, the mystery and power of the unseen energy appearing in the visible world in a marvelous variety of forms." --Audubon Naturalist News

"Here is Mr. Peattie at his superb best. . . . [H]e makes the story of botany and its pursuit as fascinating to the reader as it is to him, and the reading of it a delight." --Hartford Times

"[Peattie] belongs with Gilbert White, Thoreau, John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jeffries, and John Muir." --Mark van Doren

First published in 1939, this beautifully imaginative book is about botany much in the same sense that Walden is about a pond. Part natural history, part biography, and part philosophical reflection, Flowering Earth is written in a warm, lyrical style that made poet-scientist Donald Culross Peattie one of America's best-known naturalist writers.