Rooted in Time

Carole Gee has produced a personal and engaging book that will educate and satisfy the botanical community—nature enthusiasts, gardeners, and botanists of all genres—about the deep time history of plants growing on Earth today. Her distinctive mix of science and personal experience with each chapter's species makes for an enjoyable read.

A fast-paced and beautifully illustrated tour through the most interesting aspects of some of the unique plants in our modern world. Unique because, although they are unusual and often unfamiliar to us today, they show in strikingly vivid detail and color the types of vegetation that dominated landscapes millions of years ago, sometimes well before the dinosaurs.

This is a wonderful book of botanical pilgrimages, from stromatolite-teaming Shark Bay in Australia to fog-enshrouded forests of Japanese umbrella pine: a plant-centric travelogue through deep geological time and space, teaming with botanical facts and personal anecdotes, as Carole Gee ponders whether the plants in her beautifully written and researched book qualify as 'living fossils.'

Rooted In Time leads us through the evolutionary pageantry of new plant forms evolving, rising to stardom, becoming dominant, losing out to new arrivals, but hanging on, somewhere, somehow: horsetails and clubmosses relegated to supporting roles, trees such as umbrella pines or ginkgo thrown back to tiny relic areas. Time travel with plants—a fascinating read on our green planet.

Rooted in Time is a testament to a life spent loving and studying plants. Approachable and heartfelt, Gee's work is filled with stories that build bridges between the plants of today and botanical relics of the past. With both beautifully illustrated watercolors and vibrant photos, this book will educate and inspire those who are curious about the longevity of plants over paleontological time. Highly recommended for gardeners, horticulturalists, and budding botanists of all ages.