52 Flowers That Shook My World

A radical return to earth

In 1991, I leave a fashionable London life and goes on the road. Her decision to break free has been influenced by the appearance of a flower, known as Mexican wormseed.

Later she begins an exploration into the language of plants that changes her direction – and the territory she travels through – utterly. The plants come in dreams, in visions, in medicine ways and myths, in the lives of writers and in the practice of writing, and as she follows their track, crossing the thorny deserts of Arizona and the flowering wastelands of England, they call her back to the heartland, back to the shore where the sea-kale grows, to restore a world where nature and beauty are at the centre of life, and, most of all, to return to herself, someone who loved to be light and at liberty, an independent female being at home on the Earth.

From the Oxford Botanical Gardens to the streets of Mexico City, this is the story of search for a reconnection with nature and human liberation that speaks urgently of the future.

You can order 52 Flowers That Shook My World from The Dark Mountain Project online shop here.

Unpublished chapters are also posted on my archive site. You can read them here.