Vanishing Landscapes

The story of our relationship with plants, from the Medieval period to today's British landscape.

In the past, we were deeply bound to plants. But we no longer understand nature as we once did. We value a plant for its use, often processing it until it barely approximates what once grew in the ground. We have lost a sense of plants as precious.

Vanishing Landscapes tells the story of how this happened - and with it the history of how we became modern. From the 1500s, in the space of just two hundred years, plants disappeared from our daily lives one by one. First were apples, then household medicines like saffron, cloth dyes like woad and then, eventually, the timber from which we built 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 the professionalisation of medicine.

Through eight different plants, Bonnie Lander Johnson conjures up a world we never knew, but whose loss we are still feeling. She takes us out into the fields of Britain and Ireland to camp in an orchard, to gaze up at an unchanging sky, and to meet the farmers and artisans who are fighting to save the old ways.

Vanishing Landscapes is a timely reminder of the life we have lost and what we can still save.