50 PLANTS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD by Stephen A. Harris; Jaw-dropping effect of wheat on our faces!

IF YOU sit down with a cup of tea and a biscuit today, spare a moment to ponder the centuries – in some cases, millennia – of trial and error and human ingenuity which have gone into developing your snack.

Tea has been drunk in the West since the 16th century. Even though tea quickly became popular, the Chinese maintained an iron grip on the supply of this delicious brew and were secretive about how it was produced.

It wasn’t until the mid-19th century that the Scottish botanist and plant hunter Robert Fortune, travelling through China in disguise, was able to confirm that green and black tea were produced by the same plant, Camellia sinensis.

Fortune was able to send thousands of seeds and 2,000 tea plants to India, along with skilled Chinese workers, and his efforts laid the groundwork for the flourishing Indian tea industry.

As for the wheat in your biscuit, it took 10,000 years of breeding and selection to produce it. ‘Domesticated’ cereals like wheat are so much easier to chew than wild-collected plant foods that wheat has changed the human face; since we humans started consuming it, our jaws have become more delicate and our teeth are smaller than those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

The chocolate covering on your biscuit is a relative newcomer, the result of a mere 2,000 years of horticultural tinkering. Even so, when cocoa beans first reached Europe from Central America in the 16th century, drinking chocolate was far from the melt-inthe-mouth treat that we know today: ‘more a drink for pigs, than a drink for humanity,’ was the verdict of one disgruntled early consumer.

This book expertly shows just how many plants have been crucial to the way we live now. Stephen Harris, a botanist, enlightens us about the oak, ‘the tree that launched a thousand ships’.

From the 16th century until the age of steam in the mid19th century, it was oak ships that enabled Europeans to sail around the globe. It took 600 oaks to build Henry VIII’s Mary Rose warship. An altogether less wholesome crop is tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum, which ‘has probably killed more of us than any other plant on the planet’.

When it first arrived in Europe in the 16th century, it was regarded as a universal cure-all for everything from hallucinations to syphilis, although not everyone was seduced by it. James I, in his famous treatise, A Counterblaste To Tobacco, presciently described smoking as ‘hatefull to the Nose, harmefull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs.’

This scholarly and beautifully illustrated book is packed full of nuggets of information and vividly illustrates how, even in our industrialised, ultra-processed world, plants are still central to our existence. ‘Plants pervade every aspect of our lives,’ Harris writes. ‘Everything we do is ultimately dependent on plants.’