The way I was taught history, in discrete segments that usually had big gaps between eras and places, means that it’s only now that I’m an adult that I’ve started to wonder about what I’ve missed. A few years ago, I read an amazing article by Paul M. Cooper (the brilliant creator and narrator of the Fall of Civilizations podcast) in The Atlantic (paywalled, unfortunately, but Open Culture has a brief overview) about what happened to the Colosseum after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Without the empire to continue to use it for its original purpose, it fell into disrepair. Romans took stones to build other things. Weather took care of a lot of the rest. Centuries later, natural philosophers, scientists, and botanists discovered that the ruin had become home to hundreds of species of plants, some of which weren’t native to the area and only managed to grow in Rome because of the Colosseum’s unique microclimates. Katy Simpson Smith’s virtuoso novel, The Weeds, brings us two botanists, in two different centuries, to the same place to explore questions about the nature of science, resilience, anger, and preservation...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type.