Gardening & Landscape Design, Poetry 

This anthology brings together over 250 poems about flowers, plants and trees from eight centuries of writing in English: 14th-century lyrics sit next to poems of the 21st century; celebrations of plants native to the English soil share the volume with more exotic plant poetry from further afield. There are 30 poems about roses, by poets as diverse as Shakespeare, Dorothy Parker and the South African, Seitlhamo Motsapi; but there are also sections devoted to more unusual plants such as the mandrake, the starapple and the tamarind. An ex-gardener, the poet Sarah Maguire brings her extensive botanical knowledge to bear on all the poems, arranging them into botanical families, identifying the plants being written about and writing an introduction about how the history of flowers goes hand in hand with the history of English poetry. - from Amzon