Nothing in it to correct

There is not one identifiable plant in this book. I checked, which tells you something about me. There is a metaphorical seed in the parenting section and a garden mentioned in passing that could be anywhere, and that is the lot, so for once I had nothing to be pedantic about and had to read the thing straight on its own terms.

I have spent twenty two years being the person who is happiest three hours into a survey with nobody within a mile of her. My doctorate was on Sphagnum in a Cumbrian raised bog, which is to say four autumns kneeling in cold water counting things, alone, and I do not think I have ever been happier than I was in that bog. When people ask about it I describe it as lonely work, because that is the word they are waiting for, and it has never once felt lonely. This is the first book I have read that treats that as an ordinary way to be rather than as a symptom of something.

The chapter that genuinely got me is the one on the culture of personality. I sit on two committees. On both of them the person who talks most is listened to most, and on both of them that person is frequently and demonstrably wrong. There is a bryologist I have worked with for a decade who says perhaps four sentences in an hour, and every one of them rearranges the room, and I have watched chair after chair talk straight over him. I have also done it myself, which is the part I would rather not have noticed.

The research is handled well, or well enough. I am not a psychologist, and I've got the field biologist's suspicion of any discipline where the effect sizes are small and the sample is undergraduates, and there are places here where one study is asked to hold up an entire chapter. The work on high-reactive infants I found genuinely convincing and went off and read around. The corporate case studies I found much less so, though I recognise they are there to sell the argument to the people who most need to hear it, which is a compromise I can respect without enjoying.

What I did not expect was how much of it turned out to be about my marriage. My husband teaches secondary and physically recharges at a party; I have watched it happen to him, like watering a wilted thing. For years we have had a low-grade argument about Sundays. He wants people in the house. I want the glasshouse and the radio off. The section on couples with mismatched thresholds is neither deep nor new, but it handed us a vocabulary, and we had a real conversation instead of the usual exchange of sighs, and he has taken to announcing that he is going off to be extroverted at someone. I'll take it.

One complaint, and it is properly my own. The book leans, more than once, on the introvert who prefers nature to people, and it does that lightly, as shorthand, without ever asking what it means. Being outdoors is not a retreat from other people. A bog is not an empty room. It is the most crowded place I know, and the reason I can spend nine hours in one without speaking is not that nothing is happening, it is that a very great deal is happening and none of it requires me to perform for it. She never quite gets to that distinction. Jahren does more with it in half a page, in a book that isn't even about temperament.

Small practical notes, since nobody else will give you them. The audiobook is competent and slightly airless; I switched to paper a third of the way through and was happier. The hardback has generous margins, which for a book people will annotate is a real kindness. My copy came off a conference bookstall in Sheffield and got rained on in the car park, so the last forty pages are permanently warped, and I find I don't mind at all.

Nine rather than ten, because the closing section thins out into advice and the advice is fine and forgettable, and because I would have traded the whole final chapter for more of the temperament research. But I have bought three copies for other people this year, which is not a thing I do. One went to my sister, who rang me at half past ten at night to argue about it, so make of that what you will.