The Yellow Zone. Like the Twilight Zone. Only Yellow.

After running around for my get-to-know-nature scavenger hunt, I found I wanted to know more about the environment.

The Yellow Zone - my first time here. It was completely empty.

I'm an external reader at the University Library (£30 a year and you can borrow up to ten books at a time. As if anyone could carry that many at once). I had a look on the Library map to see if I could find the right zone:

There it was: Dewey classification 500-599 - the Yellow Zone.

I usually hang out in orange or blue zone - social sciences. But now, I was in Sciences - the yellow zone. Astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, zoology ... I missed botany, it only had two stacks and I had to backtrack.

I found there are two kinds of botany books. They are either very old with only line drawings, if there are any illustrations at all (I found one that didn't have any words, just formulas). Or they are very new, with lots of coloured diagrams and pictures, but so large and dense and heavy that you think twice about carrying them to the nearest table, never mind on the bus.

I was looking for books called something like Yer Basic Rocks or Plants and That. I wanted something that gave an overview, enlarged on the story I had found in the Arboretum about the Ice Age and after.

It was a bit disconcerting to read that another ice age was on its way.

Trying to find the right book was very like a trip to T K Maxx: you know the frock you want is in there, you just need to have had plenty of sleep and a good breakfast to have the strength to find it.

Eventually I came across Plants and Empire by Londa Schiebinger, a conveniently small volume that I could carry in one hand. Some of it is about natural abortifacients, and some about the huge fortunes to be made by bioprospecting for new drugs. There's a chapter about linguistic imperialism and how plants get named.

That's what I love about libraries: you go looking for one thing and discover many others.