Grass - familiar, yet a mystery.

We see it every day, tread in it, scent it, maybe plant it. But how many of us really see it - let alone appreciate its amazing presence and resilience and the way it somehow holds our planet together?

It's everywhere, this amazing secret, too little known, that we so seldom recognise. Ubiquitous, invaluable, hardy, growing, highly evolved - and unnoticed.

Here at last is a comprehensive prize-winning account of that humble sustaining weed: its science, its incredible number of species, its long, complicated, evolution, essential foodstuff for both humans and animals, uses in daily living, its poetry, mythology, symbolism and art.

Beautifully written and illustrated, this book of joy and colour is one to give and to treasure.

David Campbell Callender is a pen name of the anthropologist Ruth Finnegan