Plant

"This is a coffee table book but it’s a very, very good coffee table book. It’s produced by Kew Gardens and it’s just got fabulous pictures, full-page spreads of plants and pretty much everything you might want to know about plants in general. There’s a section called ‘The world of plants’ about their evolution and what they do for us, a section on weeds, and if you love plants this is a fun book to read. It’s quite dense. It’s not a children’s book by any means and it deals with conservation and global warming and it’s full of pictures and it’s very nice! Plants with bulbs, climbing plants, bamboos. Everything. I rather like palms. I wish! I do have a greenhouse with a few in but if I had to choose one plant which I haven’t seen in the wild, sadly, it would have to be the double coconut. This thing lives on just two islands in the Seychelles and it has this massive seed, the biggest in the world, and, unusually for plants, this palm has separate males and females. The poor females are so stunted by having to carry these massive seeds in their crowns that they often lose the tops of the trees in storms and things. It has a fascinating life history that you can read about in my own book on seeds."