Book Review: Seven Flowers by Jennifer Potter

This comprehensive book looks at seven different flowers and how they shaped our world. The author uses these flowers to explore how we've used these flowers throughout history and can now look back and use them to tell us something about where we come from and who we are.

The book covers the lotus, lily, sunflower, opium poppy, rose, tulip, and orchid.

As well as telling us when these flowers made a big impact on the history of particular cultures, it also tells us when they didn't - even when we'd have expected them to. For instance, the author explains that in Incan and Mayan mythology and ritual, the sunflower plays no role whatsoever - yet we go on to read tha since Europeans took seed from their lands to Europe, the sunflower began to have a large role in culture and was very popular for a time.

The book also looks at the economic uses of the plants, a prime example being that of the oil from the sunflower seed - developed for a higher oil percentage in Russia and even higher when the American's got their hands on it.

Of course the opium poppy was used as an excuse for war; with the British Empire fighting China for the express purposes of continuing the trade of opium to the Chinese population.

This book has a great deal of information in it and, for me, required a lot of concentration. I felt like the information in each flower chapter could have been fleshed out and made into a book of its' own. Instead it read like a bullet point list of facts and sometimes this negatively impacted the flow. However, this is a really good book and there's lots to get out of it. Even if you don't have a specific interest in any of these flowers, you will gain a greater understanding of how flowers have helped humanity survive and flourish.