Braiding Sweetgrass

A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the natural world in a way that most Western science books never attempt. “Braiding Sweetgrass” asks what would happen if we treated the land not as a resource to exploit but as a relative to care for.

Why This Book

Kimmerer holds a PhD in botany and has spent decades studying mosses and forest ecology. But she also grew up with Potawatomi teachings about the living world, and this book is where those two ways of knowing meet. The result is unlike anything else in the environmental canon. She writes about asters and goldenrod, about maple syrup and wild strawberries, about the way sweetgrass grows better when it is harvested with gratitude than when it is left alone.

The book became a slow-burning phenomenon. Published in 2013, it spent years building an audience through word of mouth before becoming one of the bestselling non-fiction titles in the country. Readers kept pressing it into the hands of people they cared about, and for good reason: it changes the way you see the world outside your door.

If “The Sixth Extinction” tells you what we are losing, “Braiding Sweetgrass” tells you what we have forgotten. It is not a counterpoint so much as a complement, offering a vision of what a healthy relationship with the natural world could look like.

What to Expect

A collection of essays organized into five sections, each named after a different way plants are used or understood. The writing is lyrical and personal, closer to memoir than textbook. Kimmerer moves between her laboratory research, her childhood memories, and Potawatomi creation stories with an ease that makes all three feel equally valid. At 408 pages it is a longer read, but many readers describe picking it up again and again over months rather than racing through it.