Bodley Head wins five-way auction for Ben Dark's 'magical' plant kingdom history

The Bodley Head has won a five-way auction for Ben Dark’s "magnificent" history of the plant kingdom, Green Kingdom: A Family History of Plants.

Will Hammond, deputy publishing director, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Caroline Dawnay at United Agents. Ben Loehnen, vice-president and editor-in chief has acquired North American rights on behalf of Avid Reader/Simon & Schuster. The Bodley Head will publish in hardback in autumn 2026.  

Green Kingdom: A Family History of Plants is billed by Bodley Head as “magnificent... a grand, multi-faceted and vividly peopled history of the plant kingdom from its evolutionary origins to the present”.  

The publisher said it will cover planetary and human history. “By grouping plants according to their various dynasties, it will show how a species or single specimen today contains within it an epic story of adaptation and survival that stretches back through millions of years of the Earth’s history,” Bodley Head said.  

“And by interweaving these stories with those of the adventurers, poets, philosophers and scientists who have shaped our understanding of the plant world over the past 2,000 years, it will reveal the ways that plants have shaped all of us, culturally, imaginatively and literally.” 

Dark is a botanist, historian and head gardener who graduated with a degree in History from Bristol University and studied horticulture at Capel Manor College before completing a traineeship at the Garden Museum and an MA in Garden and Landscape History at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research.  

His first book, The Grove: A Nature Odyssey in 19 1/2 Front Gardens, was published in 2022 by Mitchell Beazley and the Sunday Times dubbed him “the Millennial Monty Don”. He is the creator and host of the two award-winning podcasts, and in 2022 he won Journalist of the Year and the Garden Media Guild awards for his magazine journalism.  

Hammond said: “Ben Dark is doing something magical in this book: braiding the vast, majestic narrative that is the evolution of plant life with the lineage of the people who collectively pieced it together, animating ancient vanished worlds and turning taxonomy into scientific detective work and storytelling on the grandest scale. He is a sensationally gifted writer who is able to show us the epic interconnectedness of plants, the planet and humanity.” 

Dark said: “I’m delighted to be working with The Bodley Head and a team who share my excitement for this new history of nature’s green kingdom. Chasing the remarkable story of plants across human and geological epochs is an ambitious project but I could not want better company with which to do it.”