Vanishing Landscapes

‘Rich and replenishing … I felt lovesick for it after it was done’ ELEANOR CATTON, Booker Prize-winning author

‘A fascinating, original story’ TLS

‘I really loved this book’ JENN ASHWORTH

‘A real treasure’ ROWAN WILLIAMS, former Archbishop of Canterbury

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In the past, we were deeply bound to all things green and growing. We once knew the landscape and the plants around us as well as we knew ourselves. But today our relationship with plants and nature has grown distant – we have lost a sense of plants as precious.

Vanishing Landscapes tells the story of how plants disappeared from our daily lives one by one. First were apples, then household medicines like saffron, cloth dyes like woad, grapes for making wine, and then, eventually, the timber and reeds we used to build our houses and the wheat we grew for our bread. In their place came the first corporation, the first factory, the banking system, private property, global trade, and modern medicine.

The history of these plants shows us how we became modern, but it also shows a path to recover some of what we have lost. In Vanishing Landscapes, Bonnie Lander Johnson goes in search of the old life and the people who are still connected to the land. She meets farmers in Ireland, wine makers in Yorkshire and cloth dyers in the Highlands. She cuts reeds in the watery Norfolk fens and camps overnight in a West Country orchard to gaze up at an unchanging sky.