Excerpt from A Garden of Marvels by Ruth Kassinger, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Denmark, Spain, Italy, Hungary, France, and Germany have started multiple research and commercialization projects, and the European Union projects that 12 percent of its energy will come from miscanthus by 2050. In the United States, the USDA is supporting projects that are expected to have 100,000 acres in miscanthus. BP recently invested $500 million for miscanthus research at the University of Illinois.

I am fascinated by the prospect of new biofuels in general, and intrigued by miscanthus. When Dean tells me it would probably take about an acre and a half of miscanthus to heat a typical house in Ontario, I mentally add a good stand of miscanthus to my dream house, the one in the country where I won't have to wonder whether a neighbor's leylandii will fall on my roof. Miscanthus can't fill all our energy needs. You can't put miscanthus directly in your gas tank. But thanks to a million years of evolutionary fine-tuning, each leaf is a marvel of a machine for turning sunlight into stored energy.

Excerpted from A Garden of Marvels by Ruth Kassinger. Copyright © 2014 by Ruth Kassinger. Excerpted by permission of William Morrow. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.