The Brief Life of Flowers

"Fiona’s work explores our fascination with nature: flowers, trees and landscapes. The first line of her book reads I can measure my entire life with leaves and petals and she goes on to explain this through vivid reflections of childhood memories of flowers. She goes on to describe how the beauty of flowers has inspired creative minds from Botticelli to Beatrix Potter, in a series of mini-essays examining a miscellany of plants. One of the things I love about this book is that it gives as much time to a thistle as it does to conventionally beautiful flowers – sunflowers, poppies and so on; by the time you put the book down, if you hadn’t yet seen beauty and wonder in a thistle, the chances are you soon will! I’ve spent many a happy hour in a carpark identifying weeds! You don’t have to go to a rainforest to appreciate striking works of nature."