"Besides exploring the relationship between poetic and scientific responses to the green world within the context of humanity's changing concepts of its own place in the ecosphere, Molly Mahood considers the part that flowering plants played in the daily lives, and therefore in the literary work of a number of writers who could all be called poet-botanists. A concluding chapter looks closely at the meanings, old or new, that plants retained or obtained in the violent twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.