{"product_id":"digital-product-11","title":"The Forgotten Orchard: Remembering What Nearly Vanished","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Forgotten Orchard: A History of the Plants We Nearly Lost — and the People Who Wouldn't Let Them Go\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e(Print available soon on Amazon)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn the winter of 1941, nine scientists in besieged Leningrad starved to death guarding a seed collection they refused to eat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTheir story is the first of twenty-three others like it — plants that carried empires, fed famines, built fortunes, and vanished almost without a trace, saved in the end not by luck but by people who simply refused to look away.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Forgotten Orchard is a work of narrative history built around a single, deceptively simple premise: the plant is never the protagonist. The people are. Across six movements — wars and sieges, empire and forced migration, the reckoning of monoculture, quiet sanctuaries, Indigenous stewardship, and the science of rediscovery — this book follows real, documented history across five continents and three thousand years:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA Roman emperor eating the last stalk of the ancient world's most valuable plant, ending it forever\u003cbr\u003eA Cherokee family carrying a pocketful of beans through the Trail of Tears\u003cbr\u003eAn orphaned Kazakh stable boy who spent fifty secret years protecting a scientific discovery that had already cost his mentor his life\u003cbr\u003eA single wild coffee shrub in Sierra Leone, found after sixty-four years of silence, that may hold the key to feeding a coffee industry threatened by climate change\u003cbr\u003eA tree presumed extinct for ninety million years, found alive in a hidden Australian canyon by an off-duty park ranger\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEach chapter reads as its own complete story — richly researched, narratively driven, built from primary sources, letters, court records, and the documented words of the people who actually lived it. Together, they build toward a single question this book asks again and again, in twenty-three different forms:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat nearly disappeared — and why does it still matter today?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFor readers of narrative nonfiction, environmental history, and books that turn overlooked corners of the past into stories you won't want to put down.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e \u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Smith'n Shrooms","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43205466914891,"sku":null,"price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0671\/5047\/9435\/files\/thumbnail.png?v=1789618569","url":"https:\/\/smithnshrooms.com\/products\/digital-product-11","provider":"Smith'n Shrooms","version":"1.0","type":"link"}