I received this book from Netgalley in exchange of an honest review.

I just love botany books, the drawings are often so gorgeous and pretty bringing the plant to life in front of your eyes. So this one definitely had to come with me on my Netgalley shelf.

And this was such an interesting book, it is split up in various chapters each highlighting another artist/naturalist (if you want to call it fancy) and a few of their works. Of course, everything is mushrooms. Big mushrooms, colourful mushrooms, tall mushrooms, mushrooms that just look like ears or a piece of bread. I loved reading about each naturalist and also see what kind of style they had for drawing nature. For example the first one is soft and colourful whereas the second naturalist goes for black/white/brown and, as I would call it, more stiff/stern drawings (sorry, I just don’t know a better word for it, so I hope this makes sense). I loved all the different styles and ways to draw or show a mushroom. It was just so interesting and gave me new insights in the mushrooms. Oh, and made me want to go outside with a camera to snap some shots of mushrooms.
I definitely saw some mushrooms I have never seen (either in real life or in books) so that was a delight though I wanted to know where I could find these so I could see them for real. XD

But the blurb specifies that EACH painting show the plant (thus the mushroom) in its natural habitat.. but um, where then? I mean for most we just see one to multiple mushrooms. Sometimes there is a dot of grass or a tree bark seen, but that is it.

I do agree that this would be a great book for any artist who wants to try their hand at botanical drawings. The details in this one are just stunning and you can also see the way they did shadows and showed various bits of the mushrooms.

All in all, if you love mushrooms or botanical art I would recommend this gorgeous book to all.