A.B.C. Maps Product Profile

The Nature of Plants

By John Dawson and Rob Lucas

Habitats, challenges and adaptations of plants around the world

The Nature of Plants tells how plants adapt to the challenges of their habitats. Illustrated throughout with superb colour photographs, it is written in a way that is clear to anyone who wishes to understand the life of plants.

The book takes the reader on a tour of plant habitats from the seashore up into the mountains, and from the tropics to the poles. Plants may live in places that provide too little rainfall, yet they thrive, either by evading drought, like the animals that live in deserts, or by tolerating the scarcity. Plants have also adapted to living with too much water, dispersing their fruits and seeds without having floods and tides carry them away into the sea. There are plants that must live with fire, and others that grow in areas of deadening cold. Plants flourish on salty or toxic soils, some even concentrating the lethal substances in their tissues.

Also revealed are the hidden associations plants have with bacteria and fungi.

314 pages. Hard Cover with Dust Jacket. 271mm X 193mm.