Weeds and Wild Flowers is a collection of poems written by Alice Oswald and Jessica Greenman. It was published in 2009. The poems are written by Oswald and illustrated by Greenman. Oswald is an English poet whose work is very famous and is known for winning many prizes. She won a T.S Eliot prize for her works. Oswald is known for her interest in poetry, gardening, ecology, and music. For her part, Greenland is an English artist living in London, who has been recognized for black and white, figurative sketches.
Weeds and Wild Flowers mainly personifies flowers. Oswald cleverly finds the commonalities between plants and humans. She pretends that humans become flowers and plants become humans, and imagines what their lives will be. The illustrations of Greenman give life and beautifies those poems, making them more vivid to the readers. Oswald gives each flower a personality, making the readers contemplate about the real lives of plants.
The poem-collection received numerous reviews from normal readers and critics worldwide. For one, it received a 4 out of a 5-star rating on Goodreads. Zanna, a Goodreads member ,wrote on the book: "Uncomfortable throughout, with its richly sensuous descriptions, and at times dark and even menacing, this collection of personalities and figures invokes disgust and sympathy." The Guardian wrote a full review on Oswald and her works and said about this book in particular: "Shrugging off professional practicality (gardening is her day-job), Oswald takes the odd, evocative common names of plants and flowers and dreams up the characters behind them, in language as rich, gnarled and fabulous as Greenman's tangled, overblown etchings." A blogger on the dovegreyreader site said in her review that Weeds and Wild Flowers "has touched a divining chord too, and at a time when (she is) surrounded by floribundence."
