The Forge Arc Bundle

The Forgotten Orchard: A History of the Plants We Nearly Lost — and the People Who Wouldn't Let Them Go

(Print available soon on Amazon)

In the winter of 1941, nine scientists in besieged Leningrad starved to death guarding a seed collection they refused to eat.

Their 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.

The 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:


A Roman emperor eating the last stalk of the ancient world's most valuable plant, ending it forever
A Cherokee family carrying a pocketful of beans through the Trail of Tears
An orphaned Kazakh stable boy who spent fifty secret years protecting a scientific discovery that had already cost his mentor his life
A 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
A tree presumed extinct for ninety million years, found alive in a hidden Australian canyon by an off-duty park ranger

Each 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:

What nearly disappeared — and why does it still matter today?

For readers of narrative nonfiction, environmental history, and books that turn overlooked corners of the past into stories you won't want to put down.