Alma grows up roaming the greenhouses and woodlands of the family estate, and in adulthood remains happiest when flopped on her belly, skirts hiked, admiring the workings of plants. Her father, a British transplant of low birth and high ambition, made an early fortune in botanical pharmaceuticals. Alma Whittaker is a big-boned girl with an unruly cockade of red hair, energy to burn and the good luck to have been born in 1800 to the wealthiest man in Philadelphia. The class was evolutionary botany, and its wisdom makes a handy prerequisite for Elizabeth Gilbert’s expansive new novel, “The Signature of All Things,” about a botanist whose hunger for explanations carries her through the better part of Darwin’s century. It’s just that catching them in flagrante delicto might require time-lapse photography. They migrate, communicate, deceive, stalk their food and, with an ostentation of styles and perfumes to put the animal kingdom to shame, they make love.
By “superior” I believe he meant “uncommonly patient.” Plants do everything animals do, but slowly.
As for the organisms in our purview, his credo was: It takes a superior mind to appreciate a plant. But hereafter in class, as scientists, we would look to life itself as primary source. If we wanted a secondary source to explain life’s existence, the professor said, we were free to spend extracurricular angst reconciling those conflicting reports. My most influential college course began with an assignment from the Book of Genesis: we read the two different creation stories that coexist there. _ 'My own 500-pager of choice? Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things. Radiating with all the heart, soul and earthiness as its unforgettable heroine, The Signature of All Things is a captivating celebration of the workings of this world, and the mechanisms behind all life. But as her careful studies draw her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she meets the man who she will come to love – whose perspective, radically different from her own, will transform the way she understands the world. Her passion for botany leads her far from home, from London to Peru to Tahiti, in pursuit of that rare specimen: knowledge. Gilbert's prose is by turns flinty, funny, and incandescent' - New Yorker _ A captivating story of botany, exploration and desire, by the multimillion copy bestselling author of Eat Pray Love Everything about life intrigues Alma Whittaker.
extensively researched, compellingly readable' - Jane Shilling, Daily Telegraph 'Sumptuous. _ SHORTLISTED FOR THE WELLCOME BOOK PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION _ 'Quite simply one of the best novels I have read in years' - Elizabeth Day, Observer 'Charming.
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