In these times of social media saturation, many are the travelers who set off to track down an Instagrammable meal at a hole-in-the-wall featured by Anthony Bourdain or David Chang. Seamus O’Brien, however, journeyed to an unfamiliar locale with an analog guide from another era: the notes made by Joseph Dalton Hooker as he chronicled his journeys in the Sikkim Himilaya in the northeastern most corner of India. Eager to see the plants described in Hooker’s account, O’Brien set off nearly one hundred and fifty years later to trace Hooker’s footsteps through the natural wonders of the Himalayas, recounting the adventure in this new book. With Hooker as his guide, O’Brien compares mid-nineteenth-century notes to twenty-first-century reality—and he discovers that remarkably little has changed. Accompanied by Hooker’s maps and illustrations, the book is a testament to the region’s splendor and to Hooker’s skill as a botanist and cartographer.

Monsters under Glass explores our enduring fascination with hothouses and exotic blooms, from their rise in ancient times, through the Victorian vogue for plant collecting, to the vegetable monsters of twentieth-century science fiction and the movies, comics, and video games of the present day. Our interest in hothouses can be traced back to the Roman emperor Tiberius, but it was only in the early nineteenth century that a boom in exotic plant collecting and new glasshouse technologies stimulated the imagination of novelists, poets, and artists, and the hothouse entered the creative language in a highly charged way. Decadent writers in England and Europe—including Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde—transformed the hothouse from a functional object to a powerful metaphor of metropolitan life, sexuality, and being replete with a dark underside of decay and death; and of consciousness itself, nurtured and dissected under glass.

In a study as wide-ranging, vivid, and beautiful as our beloved exotic blooms themselves, Jane Desmarais charts the history and influence of these humid, tropical worlds and their creations, providing a steamy window onto our recent past.