Book Description
Flora Mirabilis is a sumptuously designed showcase of superb illustrations paired with fascinating stories of botanical exploration and trade through the ages. A collaboration between National Geographic and the world-renowned Missouri Botanical Garden, this book will prove an evergreen source of delight, not just for gardeners and flower aficionados, but for anyone interested in the plant world, human civilization, and their intertwined histories.

From prehistory to the present day, Flora Mirabilis blossoms with legend and lore as it culls the most engrossing mysteries and adventures of plant exploration, science, and discovery and garlands them with astonishingly beautiful illustrations. These lavish pages are abloom with the rich details and engaging allure of beloved flowers, stunning gardens, ancient trees, medicinal herbs, and valuable plants of all varieties from around the world. Unique "plant profiles" chronicle the especially remarkable roles each plant has played in matters of economics, politics, and taste.

Illustrated throughout with never-before-published collector’s edition reproductions and introduced with an eloquent foreword by Peter H. Raven, president of the Missouri Botanical Garden, this stunning volume will catch eyes and flower in imaginations everywhere.

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The Top 10 Plants That Shaped the World

Click on thumbnails for larger images

Black pepper Demand for this flavoring set in motion the great voyages of discovery.	Sugarcane Its sweetness begat a shameful trade in human beings and the plantation system of agriculture.	Corn A New World cultivar--maize--took over the planet and is now an all-too-common ingredient in human and animal food products.	Rubber Its special properties forever changed the face of transportation, industry, and everyday life (even though synthetics are now in wide use).	Cotton Native to both Asia and the Americas, its seedpods yield a fiber that has clothed the entire world.

Opium poppy Benefit and bane derive from its flowers, source of both morphine and heroin.	Tobacco Once regarded as a medical panacea, tobacco's highly addictive chemicals have hooked hundreds of millions over the centuries.	Potato This versatile and nutritious food plant originated in the Americas but beguiled the Irish; widespread blight led to mass starvation and flight—and emigration to America.	Coffee Roasted beans yield a beverage long at the center of urban social life, from the London coffeehouses of the 18th century, to the Parisian cafés of the 20th, to the Starbucks craze of the 21st.	Cacao Source of chocolate, from genus Theobroma, "food of the gods"--need we say more?

(Illustrations courtesy of the Missouri Botanical Garden Library)