By Silver Webb.

Having suffered some fatalities on my bookshelf last year (a glass of water on the top shelf dispatched many of my paperbacks as it fell), I’ve been wanting to plump up the “plant magic” section of my bookshelf. And to that end, I ordered Witch’s Garden on a whim, assuming that it was about, well, witches and their gardens. I was wrong about that, but delightfully surprised at what the book does contain. Published by the Royal Botanic Garden Kew, the book features herbarium sheets from the 1800s onward, botanical illustrations of plants, and illustrations from the medieval ages. In plenty. Virtually no page of this beautifully designed little gem is without some visual interest. The author, Sandra Lawrence, artfully describes the lore and medicinal practice of many plants you’ll be familiar with, focusing on how they were used in the past.

I found it particularly fun to look at specimens from two-hundred years ago of my favorite plants, and see if they still look the same today. I didn’t realize the Royal Botanical Gardens Kew made or saved such things in their archives, and I’m delighted to find that herbariums exist and that the Kew Herbarium began in 1841 and now has 7 million herbarium sheets accounting for nearly 95 percent of the world’s plants species. You will find herbarium sheets of motherwort from 1962, sage collected in 1880, a stalk of vervain preserved in 1895. These full-page photos show the details of how the specimens were attached to the page and the hand-written notes about where and when it was collected. It’s a wonder to feel as if you are peeking into the archives themselves and finding, for lack of a better term, mummified plants.

Sandra Lawrence is an accomplished author, with two more books in the Kew series, as well as books with other publishers, including Atlas of Monsters, Anthology of Amazing Women, and more. She describes herself as someone who “loves London, Film Noir, Victorian gardeners, Arthurian legend, rockabilly, Femmes Fatales, strange folklore, disturbing mythology and collecting 1950s Mexican souvenir skirts, but not necessarily in that order.” It takes luck, pluck, talent, and time to create and have published this many books, and for that I admire her. She is clearly very good at researching a wide variety of topics. She has written, among other things, The Lost Gardens of the World, about 40 magical gardens that fell into decline, which I would love to read.

What you might be expecting, if you are used to Llewellyn or Wiccan books on green witchery, is the personal voice of the author, along with spells and magical recommendations for gardens. That is not present here. There is not even a biography of Sandra featured in the book, you have to look online to find that. She writes this as a journalist, well-researched and informative, with her personality showing in some of the more odd things medieval people thought plants could do for them (and sometimes they were right!)

Through a well-curated list of plants, you learn about Egyptians scenting mummy veils with lavender, spoons carved of rosemary wood to counteract poisoning, the “Apple Tree Man” or spirit that resides in apple trees, elderberry screaming with pain when burned, and other curious lore. I particularly liked the entry on Ferns, which says that early botanists, confused by how ferns reproduced with no flowers, “assumed the blossom was invisible,” and that “anyone who managed to catch a fern in blossom, therefore, could also acquire powers of invisibility” or even “understand birds and animals, find hidden treasure and gain the strength of 40 men.” So guess who is going out to the fern grotto to see if I can spot a flower or two! All told, I found the entries on plants to be quite charming and well-researched. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading from cover to cover. It’s the kind of book you pick up and flip through, land on something interesting, and get drawn in.

The book really picks up in the last thirty pages, as she goes into “The Dark Mirror: Plants of the Shadows.” This is where you will Wormwood, Henbane, and Deadly Nightshade, with more references to witches than in the first part of the book. The entry on Fly agaric may well be my favorite, which begins with the truism, “Fungi are strange.”

I recommend this book to anyone who likes history of the medieval ages, botany, folklore, and, well, plants. If you are a green witch, and consider plants to be your friends, you will be reading the history of your friends, and hopefully thereby enriching your experience of tending them in the modern day.

I look forward to delving into The Witch’s Forest and Magic Mushrooms: Fungi in folklore, superstition, and traditional medicine, also by Sandra Lawrence and from the same Kew series.