By Diana Woodcock. Shanti Arts, 2025.

Reverent Flora: The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty is a collection of poetry that catalogues the Arabian Desert’s critically endangered, disappearing flora while promoting caretaking of the earth. Living for two decades at the edge of the Arabian Desert, poet Diana Woodcock became most interested in local and global conservation issues, as well as in the environmental ethic of the Qur’an. In anticipation of the opening of Qatar’s UNESCO-sponsored Qur’anic Botanic Garden—the purpose of which is to maintain for scientific and educational purposes a living collection of Qatar’s 270-plus indigenous plants and to showcase the 52 mentioned more than once in the Qur’an—the author began writing poems that feature the ecology and flora of the region, which is in the throes of a major environmental calamity. Reverent Flora inspires a greater appreciation of and commitment to protecting not only the unique environment of the Arabian Peninsula, but other equally endangered ecosystems around the world.

Diana Woodcock has authored seven poetry collections, most recently Reverent Flora ~ The Arabian Desert’s Botanical Bounty (Shanti Arts, 2025), Heaven Underfoot (2022 Codhill Press, Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award), Holy Sparks (2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award finalist), and Facing Aridity (2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature finalist). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Net nominee, she received the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders. Currently teaching at VCUarts Qatar, she holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic.