A World of Plants (Candlewick Studio, 2021) will feel like pure nostalgia to anyone who grew up reading library and hand-me-down science books. The illustrations, by British printmaker James Brown, make this tea-tray-size hardback look like the sort of thing a 1950s style maven would have put out on the coffee table to entertain visiting children.

For those of us who grew up on outdated science because of those same books—thinking that duck-billed hadrosaurs were actually a thing, for example—A World of Plants is a relief. It looks old, but the science is current. The author, conservation biologist Martin Jenkins, started working on children's books as a fact-checker and has covered scientific topics for an impressively wide range of audiences, from Fabulous Frogs (for kids) to the research paper "Tracking the Ecological Overshoot of the Human Economy" (for grown-ups).

Jenkins and Brown elegantly summarize subjects like mycorrhizal networks and "the wood-wide web" at kid level without patronizing readers of any age. Even scientifically literate adults are likely to learn new things (like the properties of 12 types of soil and how species evolved from bryophytes to flowering plants). The authors nicely describe and illustrate the carbon cycle, which may be old news for some but is looming large in all of our lives. A World of Plants is highly recommended for all the infographically inclined children in your life.