I was entranced by living things as a kid. I was never happier than when I was planting a seed and watching it grow, prodding something in a rock pool or releasing a butterfly freshly emerged from its chrysalis in a jar. Science was my favorite subject at school. I''d look at a living thing and think, how does this work? As a teenager I worked at a marine aquarium and foraged among the rocks at low tide for unusual sea creatures. My bedroom was a jungle of jars, pots and tanks crammed with botanical curiosities. I''d document all these things carefully, painting and illustrating the plants I grew - seeking to make sense of them. I was destined to be a botanist. Many of the plants you will find in this book are the subjects of my scientific research today.

One line of my work examines how carnivorous and parasitic plants evolved to look and behave the way they do. Carnivorous pitcher plants, which feature prominently in my paintings, produce traps derived from leaves, to attract, capture, kill and digest prey, to enable them to survive in nutrient-poor environments. In my twenties I spent time in Borneo, where I was struck by their bewildering array of shapes and sizes. Now, research shows that their assorted geometries mirror their diet. For example, the magnificent pitchers of Nepenthes rajah feed on manure: tree shrews scamper onto the pitchers and leave their nutrient-rich droppings behind in them. And that is why its pitchers are so sturdy: they are animal toilets. What can we learn from nature? Living things have evolved exquisite solutions to cope with the challenges they face, and these can inspire design in technology. Water-repellent lotus leaves, water-collecting wing-cases of desert beetles and water-removing gecko skin are some of the many organisms that have solved technological challenges relating to water movement.

I work with physicists to explore potential plant-based solutions. Take the rim of the carnivorous pitcher plant. When wet, the rim becomes slippery, which leads insects to slide off it, along a series of chutes, into the trap. Creating artificial surfaces inspired by pitcher plants, we revealed a potential mechanism for droplet transport, guided by chutes. We found they trap, retain and direct the travel of droplets with absolute precision - just as they guide insects into the traps in nature. Such a system could be a means of transporting and sorting droplets along predetermined pathways in artificial devices such as ink-jet printers. What can plants do for us? I also work with scientists around the world to understand the diversity of desert hyacinths ( Cistanche ). These curiously beautiful plants, which feature prominently in this book, may form part of a solution to the global problem of desertification (land degradation).

Desert hyacinths are parasitic on the roots of desert shrubs including saxaul and tamarisk. Both these shrubs can be planted to form stabilizing ''shelter forests'' to halt desertification, which is fast emerging as a global crisis. In China, where desert hyacinths are prized for food and herbal medicine, farmers have started to grow them alongside these shelter forests as an ancillary crop. If we can grow desert hyacinths on a global scale, maybe we can achieve two goals at once: meeting people''s requirements for food and medicine, while reducing the need to harvest rare wild desert hyacinths under threat. But first we need to make sense of their diversity so we understand which ones to protect and which ones to cultivate. This is where taxonomy - the discipline that helps scientists understand and organize the dazzling diversity of life on our planet - comes in. We can only protect what we know to exist. That''s why botanists are in a race against time to find and describe new species so they may be conserved.

Recently, I worked with local botanists in Malaysia to describe a new species that, miraculously, grows along a popular tourist track running through a mountain forest. It has gone completely overlooked. But let''s be clear: many species ''discovered'' around the world every year have for millennia been known and used by people who go unrecognized. This imbalanced Western legacy of discovery needs to change. One way that botanists can bring about this change is to work with local people around the world, exploring its diversity and protecting it together. The journey I take us on around the world in this book is not chronological and I''ve deliberately omitted some dates to save you from getting dizzy - the clifftops and typhoons will do that well enough on their own. The book has its diversions; it hops about all over the place, just as I have. In writing it, I dipped in and out of my field notes, just as I imagine you, the reader, might dip in and out of the book.

The passages in ''To Pitcher Plant Paradise'' are from a diary I kept in Borneo in my early twenties; the snatches of time spent in Japan are much more recent. The purpose of each trip was different: as you will see, in Japan, I carried out conservation work - collecting plants for seed-banking and carrying out vegetation surveys. In the Canary Islands I worked with local botanists and ecologists, documenting the flora and planting seedlings alongside the local community. My adventures across the Levant - some with other botanists, others forged alone - were for research, both for taxonomic purposes and for field guides to the region''s flora. My time spent with pitcher plants was more selfish: it fulfilled my childhood dreams about plants,the seeds of which, you will discover, were sown long ago outside IKEA (surprisingly). That''s why I finish my journey on Mount Kinabalu in Borneo - the place I lay awake thinking about as a child: it is as much a beginning as an ending. Why have I turned my diaries into a book? Regardless of when the trips took place and why, they are united by an uncontainable passion for plants that I need to share. ''You''ll need to be clear that you''re not just some isolated nerd looking for plants, it must have purpose!'' pleads my publisher.

Clearly I am a plant nerd, but she''s right: botanists like me have a vital role to play in raising awareness of plants. We rely on them for our very existence: for food, clothes and medicines - and, as we''re discovering more and more, for our mental health and wellbeing. They energize our planet. Yes, we''ve never needed plants more than we do now. But far more than this, plants have an intrinsic value of their own. We share the biosphere - this thin layer of life we call home -with hundreds of thousands of plant species that existed long before us, and we have a duty of care to protect them. Yet two in five are now threatened with extinction. They''re losing the fight against the threats they face amid a growing human population; some disappear before we even know they exist.

Worse still, their plight goes largely unnoticed - part of a problem referred to metaphorically as Plant Blindness. Put simply, we don''t even notice them. What can we do about it? Perhaps we can bring plants out of the shadows by portraying them differently: by showing their intrigue and their character, beyond their being a beautiful backdrop for animals to exist against. We can explain why we must protect them just as we must protect animals, and challenge the perception of what botanists do and why we care so deeply. I hope that my book will do this in some small way. Perhaps it will intrigue someone, maybe a student - the kind of person who looks at a living thing and thinks how does this work? - to dream of becoming a botanist one day. Perhaps, in turn, they might explore, wonder and seek to protect what they have read and dreamed of, and leave this world a little better than they found it.