And why am I having to call Dracaena, call a snake plant Sansevieria now calling it Dracaena? The lumpers and the splitters is how we sort of dismiss them.

Yeah.

But I think that there is an easy case.

You don't really need to hire a great big PR firm.

You just need to go back to some of the earlier writers.

My favourite is to go to Darwin.

And he, when was writing about taxonomy, he said that, as we know more about the plant world... our taxonomies will come to be genealogies, which is what they are.

So was that a difficult decision? No.

So can you tell me as well, because I've read both your books and I wanted to talk about the comparisons and differences between them a little bit, but could you give me an overview of the two of them before I do that?

Absolutely.

So I've been thinking about this quite a lot, actually.

trying to find threads and continuities between the two, and I think there's more than initially it appears.

The first book is almost a hyper-local focus book.

It's called The Grove, an Nature Odyssey in Ninety and a Half Front Gardens, and it's about a walk down a street that I used to take every day in Camberwell, taking my son to nursery, and the plants in the front gardens I passed and the stories they told.

And the second book is on a hugely different scale.

Why did you choose the families that you did choose?