Flora Poetica: The Chatto Book of Botanical Verse

This beautiful anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English, creating a rich bouquet of intriguing juxtapositions. Fourteenth-century lyrics sit next to poems of the twenty-first century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry.

There are thirty poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South African, Seitlhamo Motsapi; but there...