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This graceful essay on the pivotal role of flowers in human evolution is certain to delight those readers already familiar with Loren Eiseley and to find an audience among naturalists, gardeners, and lovers of flowers everywhere. Gerald Ackerman's color floral portraits provide a visual counterpoint to the wondrous text. Two-color text & printed endpapers. 19 color photos.
A leading botanist and popular science writer examines the crucial role flowers have played in life's evolutionary scheme as a fundamental energy resource for most of the biosphere.
An exploration of the roles flowers play in the production of our foods, spices, medicines, and perfumes reveals their origins, myriad shapes, colors, textures and scents, bizarre sex lives, and how humans-- and the natural world-- relate and depend upon them.
Flowerevolution is part traditional guidebook, part “choose-your-own-adventure”. From a stunning array of flower photographs, readers can choose the flowers they’re most attracted to, and based on those choices discover an interactive system that reveals their state of mind. The book provides specific questions for reflection and action steps to catalyze transformation in their lives. Using flowers as teachers, they can rediscover how to find new insights about themselves and their world. In many ways, with the current advancements in technology, we’ve lost our connection to nature, and in turn, our connection to ourselves. This disconnection leads to stress, fatigue, and imbalance. In Flowerevolution, we will explore the vast and beautiful world of flowers and learn how flower elixirs can be used to help us bring nature back into our everyday modern lifestyles. Packed with information, stories, reflections, and rituals, this interactive book is designed to open up readers to a fresh new world of magic and possibility. Flowerevolution reveals the secret healing powers of flowers, including ancient and modern methods for harnessing their unique qualities, like flower rituals, flower baths, and special applications for flower elixirs. “Flowers only live for a week. This book will live in your heart forever —and that’s our gift to you.”
“Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world.” —The New York Times “A wry, informed pastoral.” —The New Yorker The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?
In 1991 Charlotte Du Cann leaves a fashionable London life and goes on the road. Her decision to break free has been influenced by the appearance of a flower, known as Mexican wormseed. Later she begins an exploration into the language of plants that changes her direction - and the territory she travels through - completely. The plants come dreams, in visions, in medicine ways and myths, in the lives of writers and in writing, and as she follows their track, crossing the thorny deserts of Arizona and the flowering wastelands of England, they call her back to the heartland, back to the shore where the sea-kale grows, to restore a world where nature and beauty are at the centre of life, and, most of all, to return to herself, someone who loved to be light and at liberty, an independent female being at home on the earth. From the Oxford Botanical Gardens to the streets of Mexico City, this is the story of search for a reconnection with nature and human liberation that speaks urgently of the future.
Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life yet they are often at the center of high intrigue. In the eighteenth century, epic scientific voyages were sponsored by European imperial powers to explore the natural riches of the New World, and uncover the botanical secrets of its people. Bioprospectors brought back medicines, luxuries, and staples for their king and country. Risking their lives to discover exotic plants, these daredevil explorers joined with their sponsors to create a global culture of botany. But some secrets were unearthed only to be lost again. In this moving account of the abuses of indigenous Caribbean people and African slaves, Schiebinger describes how slave women brewed the "peacock flower" into an abortifacient, to ensure that they would bear no children into oppression. Yet, impeded by trade winds of prevailing opinion, knowledge of West Indian abortifacients never flowed into Europe. A rich history of discovery and loss, Plants and Empire explores the movement, triumph, and extinction of knowledge in the course of encounters between Europeans and the Caribbean populations.
A fantastic floral adventure and the latest sensational coloring book from bestselling artist Johanna Basford This book invites you to travel the world and beyond into fantastical realms, discovering exotic blooms and extraordinary plants along the way. From floating gardens of water poppies in South Africa to delicate cosmos in Japan, and from fanciful toadstools to enchanted fairytale gardens, an abundance of fascinating florals awaits, ready for you to bring to life in color. Join “colorist queen” (New York Magazine) Johanna Basford on a dazzling floral adventure of fantasy and imagination, filled with countless new blooms and blossoms to discover. Beautiful and interactive, World of Flowers is a blissful and relaxing at-home activity for people of all ages.
From the creator of the New York Times bestseller Women in Science, comes a new nonfiction picture book series ready to grow young scientists by nurturing their curiosity about the natural world--starting with what's inside a flower. Budding backyard scientists can start exploring their world with this stunning introduction to these flowery show-stoppers--from seeds to roots to blooms. Learning how flowers grow gives kids beautiful building blocks of science and inquiry. In the launch of a new nonfiction picture book series, Rachel Ignotofsky's distinctive art style and engaging, informative text clearly answers any questions a child (or adult) could have about flowers.
The MacArthur grant–winning environmental justice activist’s riveting memoir of a life fighting for a cleaner future for America’s most vulnerable A Smithsonian Magazine Top Ten Best Science Book of 2020 Catherine Coleman Flowers, a 2020 MacArthur “genius,” grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is also Flowers’s life’s work—a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets and, as a consequence, live amid filth. Flowers calls this America’s dirty secret. In this “powerful and moving book” (Booklist), she tells the story of systemic class, racial, and geographic prejudice that foster Third World conditions not just in Alabama, but across America, in Appalachia, Central California, coastal Florida, Alaska, the urban Midwest, and on Native American reservations in the West. In this inspiring story of the evolution of an activist, from country girl to student civil rights organizer to environmental justice champion at Bryan Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative, Flowers shows how sanitation is becoming too big a problem to ignore as climate change brings sewage to more backyards—not only those of poor minorities.