Happy to include this title in my recent thematic round-up “The Root of It,” highlighting spring’s top gardening-related for the Books section of Zoomer, Canada’s national culture magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

Dispersals is an essay collection focused on plants and place: on a small scale, Lee explores our relationships with the plants we encounter and grow up with; on a broader scale, she explains, through a series of examples, some of the ways that human history is bound up with the movement of plants from place to place. I liked the balance of information about plants and their histories and autobiographical reflections (a hard balance to find, I think) and I learned quite a lot about plants. Lee writes beautifully. I do think the discussion of parallels in how we talk about people and plants ‘out of place’ could’ve been pushed a bit further.

Thank you to the author, NetGalley, & Penguin Random House Canada for providing an ARC.

Content warnings: discussion of xenophobia, racism, and war