Plants You Meet Everywhere. My New Book

Plants You Meet Everywhere, Their Stories is the title of my new book, available on Amazon and from me. As a person who notices plants wherever she goes, I have stepped off airplanes far across the globe and felt lost. Often there are strange-shaped trees, unfamiliar shrubs, and flowers I've never seen before. I am uneasy when I don't know the plants. So when I spotted a dandelion or a marigold, it was a comfort. 

marigolds, Tagetes, growing in a garden in Cornwall 10/1/26

My new book presents 18 plants that are found around the world. They are not native around the world: the world is very big and diverse. North America, Eurasia, South America, Africa, and Australia all have distinctive plants, that have evolved there and make the place unique. Before humans started traveling all over, very few plants were found beyond their homeland. Today, there are still only a few plants you can find all over the world because they have to be able to grow in places as diverse as San Francisco, Buenos Aires, and Beijing. But a few plants do that. They are cosmopolitan. Some are weeds: nobody invited them but they tagged along anyway. Some were intentionally brought by traders, sailors, and settlers as medicines or foods but escaped to grow freely on a new continent. Some are popular international garden plants. 

dandelions, Taraxacum officinale, Salisbury England
8/27/26. England's 2026 drought killed the lawngrass
around it. 

I specifically did not include major food plants in the book. Those are the big winners of plants that humans have spread all around the globe. The distinction blurs for plants like dandelions which are fully edible and probably were brought to distant lands as food. But today, they are mostly seen as annoying weeds. 

curly dock, Rumex crispus, Salisbury England 8/27/26
Another plant spread because it is edible.

Plants You Meet Everywhere tells the stories of cosmopolitan plants, marigolds (Tagetes), bougainvillea (Bougainvillea), yellow toadflax also called butter-and-eggs (Linaria vulgaris), curly dock (Rumex crispus), ground ivy also known as creeping Charlie (Glecoma hederacea), purslane (Portulaca oleracea), chicory (Cicorium intybus), Canada thistle (Cirsium arvense) and 10 more. Found all across the world, they are loved or hated or ignored in millions of places.

petunias, Petunia, Salisbury, England 8/27/26

My book encourages you to notice these plants. I talk about where I saw them, but where did you see them?

greater plantain, Plantago major,
Salisbury, England 8/27/26
A medicinal plant but speads easily from tiny seeds.

The stories in my book are from this blog. You can read the original blog posts by searching for them on this blog. I rewrote the essays slightly to emphasize the plants' international distributions. I swapped out photos I'd improved on since I wrote the blog posts and generally neatened things. My book is for those who don't read the internet or who prefer books. My goal is to spread appeciation of plants by telling their stories. 

Yard at the Legacy Rose and Crown Inn, along the River Avon
Lots of interesting plants, including some Plants You Meet Everywhere.

Knowing the book was in late stages of production, as I traveled in the southern British Isles at the end of August and into September, I looked for the plants in my book. "Kathy is photographing weeds" my friend told the other travelers. And I was. Many of my Plants You Meet Everywhere are considered weeds. All the illustrations in this blog post are from my recent trip. The marigolds were in Cornwall, but the other five of my Plants You Meet Everywhere I found at the Legacy Rose and Crown Inn in Salisbury, England during an evening there. Curly dock, dandelions, and greater plantain are native to Europe, while petunias and marigolds originally came from the Americas. I think I saw 11 of the 18 plants in two weeks during which I traveled London to Salisbury to Cornwall, toured Cornwall, back to London, to Southampton and from Southampton to the Channel Islands, Jersey and Guernsey, an area I could call the southern or southwestern British Isles. I am tickled, since I hadn't botanized any of those places before and didn't know I'd see my chosen plants there, to have seen so many.  

The Legacy Rose and Crown at twilight, Salisbury England

 

Watch for cosmopolitan plants when you travel!

The book I've been writing about (available on Amazon and from me):

Comments and corrections welcome. 

Kathy Keeler

More at awanderingbotanist.com

Join me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AWanderingBotanist

Previous books:

Curious Stories of Familiar Plants from Around the World  available from Amazon link and from me

Curious Stories of Familiar Garden Plants available from Amazon link and from me

NoCo Notables, Stories of Common Plants of the Colorado Front Range, Plants have cool stories, about their interactions with other plants and animals and with humans. Go beyond just having a name for the plant, learn more about it. Available from Amazon link or from me. 

 

                                            

Look Twice, containing stories of plants from the unique environments found in western Nebraska and eastern Colorado, available from Amazon  link or from me. 

I Have Seen Marvels A Journey to Paraguay, 1630, is a novel I wrote, imagining the experiences of a Spanish noblewoman as she realizes a lifetime dream of seeing South America in 1630.  link

I keep changing my mind about whether to publish with my full first name or the less formal Kathy. So Amazon has me both as Kathleen Keeler and Kathy Keeler and I see no easy way to fix it.