So I cleverly turned one of the trickier (for me) Nonfiction Reader Challenge categories – gardening – into reading a book about gin! Yay me!

The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart explores, in great detail, the plants that create the ‘world’s greatest drinks’.

The book came about after a visit to a liquor store (in Australia, we call it a bottle shop, or bottle-o) with a fellow botanist –

…we stood in the doorway for a minute and looked around us. There wasn’t a bottle in the store that we couldn’t assign a genus and species … Suddenly we weren’t in a liquor store anymore. We were in a fantastical greenhouse, the world’s most exotic botanical garden…

That’s a fun party trick! Continue reading →