Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers

£12.95

Available for Pre-order. Due March 2025.
Pathless Forest: The Quest to Save the World’s Largest Flowers Author: Format: Paperback / softback First Published: Published By: Penguin Books Ltd
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Pages: 288 Language: English ISBN: 9781802062427 Categories: , , , , , , , , , , ,

As a child, Chris Thorogood dreamt of seeing Rafflesia, the world’s largest flower. Today he is a botanist at the University of Oxford’s Botanic Garden and has dedicated his life to studying the biology of such extraordinary plants. Rafflesia is a parasite, a thief. Having long ago abandoned photosynthesis, its leafless form steals food from the other plants it inhabits.

Many parasitic plants are poorly known to science, and these botanical enigmas fascinate Thorogood, just as they did when he was young. Working alongside botanists and foresters in Southeast Asia, he’s documented Rafflesia in its natural habitat. Smacking off leeches, hanging off vines, wading through rivers and wrestling with the forest he’s followed tribes into remote, untrodden rainforests to find Rafflesia‘s ghostly, foul-smelling blooms more than a metre across.

Thorogood introduces us to this mysterious world in which vines creep, forests whisper, and magnificent flowers unfold on every page. We depend on plants for our very existence, but two in five of the world’s species are threatened with extinction. As we explore this fast-disappearing wilderness, Pathless Forest presents a call to action to safeguard the environment, to look beyond the beautiful backdrop described here and see plants in a different way, as vital for our own future and for that of the planet we share together.

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A gripping, Technicolor account * Guardian * Over the years, Rafflesia has bewitched botanists – its very elusiveness adding to its mystique. For Thorogood, who already specialised in parasitic plants, it became the apex of them all. He was Captain Ahab; this was his own great white -- Tom Whipple * The Times * Rafflesia [is] one of the strangest and most gruesome plants on the planet … In his flamboyant account, Thorogood has produced a book as highly coloured as the plant itself -- Kate Teltscher * Spectator * A love letter to the largest flowers in the world: the monstrous blooms of Rafflesia … a relationship that echoes the monomania of any Werner Herzog antihero … like its subject, his prose is undemure, supersized, unbound by convention -- Rachel Aspden * Guardian * A vivid account of this gruelling expedition, combined with his fierce determination to find the pungent plants that have obsessed him for decades * Daily Mail * Thorogood’s dazzling descriptions light up the faraway forests with an impassioned commitment -- Sophy Roberts * TLS * Chris Thorogood is a self-described ‘plant junkie’. The plant on which he is hooked is a bizarre one called Rafflesia, a parasitic monster found growing only in the Philippines and Indonesia and notable for its enormous, fleshy blossom. Pathless Forests is a sort of travelogue describing Thorogood’s journey around this part of the world in search of the beasts in bloom … has all the hallmarks of adventure: nearly drowning in a river, scaling cliffs while dangling on lainas, being bitten by giant ants and stung by toxic trees … But it was worth it … and he also makes a serious broader point. Rafflesia … are threatened and on the edge of extinction. For all their strangeness, the very rarity of these gigantic living objects symbolises our continuing carelessness towards nature -- Charles Elliott * Literary Review *

Author Biography

Chris Thorogood is a botanist and lecturer at the University of Oxford, where he holds the position of Deputy Director and Head of Science at Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, and a Visiting Professor at the University of the Philippines. His research focuses on the evolution of parasitic and carnivorous plants, taxonomic diversity in biodiversity hotspots around the world, and biomimetics - exploring the potential applications of plants in technology. An author and broadcaster, he makes regular appearances on TV and radio and is also an award-winning botanical illustrator and wildlife artist. Obsessed with plants, he is on a mission to make us see them differently, and realize how we, they, and our planet, are all connected.