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Vanishing Landscapes

The Story of Plants and How We Lost Them

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Vanishing Landscapes

By: Bonnie Lander Johnson
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About this listen

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.

Vanishing Landscapes brings to life a world we never knew but still long for, and reminds us that it's not too late to find a way back.

©2025 Bonnie Lander Johnson (P)2025 Hodder & Stoughton Limited
Botany & Plants Great Britain

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In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.