Generous, patient, a little repetitive; I forgave it by the second section.

I started this in the last week of April, when the bluebells behind the house were coming up through last year's leaf litter and there was still enough wind off the sea to want gloves, and I didn't finish it until the middle of June. That isn't a complaint. Every time I tried to take it at speed I found I had absorbed nothing and had to go back a chapter.

What she does that almost nobody manages is hold two ways of knowing in one hand without apologising for either and without pretending they are the same thing. The pecan chapter is the clearest case. Mast years, whole counties of trees fruiting in unison, the still-unsettled question of how on earth they coordinate it: that is straight botany, carefully done. It is also, in the same paragraphs, a lesson about what a gift obliges you to. She never once has to announce the join. Most writers would have put a signpost there and spoiled it.

The sweetgrass harvesting experiment is the chapter I have chewed over most and argued about most. Her student's data shows the harvested plots doing better than the untouched ones. I have sat through enough conservation meetings where the answer is always a fence and a laminated sign, and this is the first thing I have read that gave me a way of saying why the fence bothers me without sounding careless about the plant.

My reservations, and there are some. It is repetitive. She circles the same three or four ideas — reciprocity, gratitude, the grammar of animacy — and by the last third I could tell the shape of a chapter from its opening page: an anecdote, a plant, a teaching, a turn towards thanks. I don't think that is a fault exactly, since ceremony works by repetition and she says as much herself. But I noticed it, and noticing took something off.

The other thing is temperature, and this is me rather than her. There are passages pitched warmer than I can comfortably read; I am Welsh and chapel-raised and something in me flinches at being told directly to feel grateful. The Windigo chapter is overworked. I skimmed two pages of it and I'm not sorry.

Where it landed, though. There is a word here, cynefin, that gets used badly in tourist copy and means something nearer to the place a creature knows itself to belong to and returns to without ever being taught. This is a book about that, arriving from a completely different tradition, and I recognised nearly all of it. That was the surprise. I expected to be a respectful visitor and I kept finding my own hillside in it.

I've bought three copies now. One went to my brother, who has never voluntarily read a word about plants, and who texted me at eleven at night to say there were chapters about MOSS! So it travels further than I thought it would.

Read it over a season. Not over a week.