Herbariums are strange places. Part archive, part library, part museum collection, they hover in a space of plant, paper, print, and preservative. Time and space are pressed between pages representing far more than their often unprepossessing appearance suggests – complex interwoven stories of evolution, ecology, and scientific history. The herbarium is a compactus of shared and public scientific knowledge created by the collected efforts of men and women from diverse cultures, backgrounds and countries often unacknowledged and unknown, their identities subsumed to the multigenerational task of revealing the taxonomic architecture of plants, fungi, and algae.

Not everyone shares this perspective. Some might find a funny-smelling building filled with shrivelled plants slightly odd or intimidating. Not everyone shares the botanist’s fascination with the floral reproductive proclivities of plants or the intricacies of their leaf margins.

The Plant Thieves leans into the aesthetics of this world with a beautiful cover – inked annotations across the sepia tones of a pressed Mount Buffalo wattle. The image nostalgically references the long history of botanical artistry. The title, however, carries different connotations. It reminds me of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (2000), which gave rise to Charlie Kaufman’s tangentially metafictive movie Adaptation (2002). Perhaps this book is not what it seems after all.