The epic story of the plant kingdom, showing its staggering variety and ingenuity over half a billion years, from an extraordinary new talent in natural-history writing.Most of life on Earth is plant. And yet the half a million species of plant alive today are a minuscule fraction of those that have ever existed. The true story of the plant kingdom's almost inconceivable variety and ingenuity is to be found in the past.From the arrival of the first plants on land 484 million years ago to the globe-spanning diversity of flora we know today, Green Kingdom traces the evolution of plant life across eons and continents, reanimating the lost worlds that shaped its course and dramatically expanding our vision of what it means to be a plant.Through the stories of sixteen plant families, from the humble bog moss to the exquisite adaptations of the orchid, we witness how plant life colonised land, pioneered leaves, recruited fungi, invented wood, sunk roots, formed seeds, manipulated animals...

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