The story of grass is bigger than grass itself; it is the story of us and our place in the natural world. From creeping turf and towering bamboo, to rolling meadows, vast savannas and fields of wheat, grass is all around us. Yet despite its ubiquity, hardly any of us pay it much mind as we trample it underfoot every day. But what is perhaps the most overlooked plant is in fact one of the most remarkable, and our casual dismissal of it belies a much deeper, more complicated relationship that stretches back to the roots of our own species.

In Grassroots Julia Rosen shows not only how this extraordinary plant exploded from near ecological obscurity to spread across the planet, reshaping the landscape and producing new ecosystems in its wake, but how its rise to dominance enabled our own.