Thoreau’s Botany: Thinking and Writing with Plants

“Thoreau's Botany has the potential to make a significant contribution to the scholarship on Thoreau and Transcendentalist studies, as well as the fields of environmental and ecological studies. It is well researched and offers a valuable portrayal of Thoreau’s gradual development into serious botanical research and efforts to develop a comprehensive understanding and treatment of plants as our true companions in nature and its life. Warren's extensive close reading of the essay "Autumnal Tints" represents a high point, and the author's disquisition on Walden’s Sand Foliage passage is particularly outstanding.” - David M. Robinson, Oregon State University, author of Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism “When Covid forced Jim Warren into a long spell of isolation in New Mexico’s arid Jemez Mountains, he found himself on an unexpected journey into "plant thinking," with Thoreau as his botanical guide into a new mode of awareness, a new way of knowing. In this illuminating book, Warren tracks Thoreau’s own experimental journey into a dynamic natural world that is thinking all the time, where plants become words spoken by the soil, bespeaking the vital language of the Earth. In this new way of understanding "the limits and possibilities of language," Warren finds, with Thoreau, a reconnection to faith in the human ability to divine meaning, even in the hard-used, drought-stricken terrain of the Anthropocene.” - Laura Dassow Walls, University of Notre Dame, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life