The Big, Bad Book of Botany

The Big, Bad Book of Botany PDF

Author: Michael Largo

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2014-08-05

Total Pages: 371

ISBN-13: 006228276X

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David Attenborough meets Lemony Snicket in The Big Bad Book of Botany, Michael Largo’s entertaining and enlightening one-of-a-kind compendium of the world’s most amazing and bizarre plants, their history, and their lore. The Big, Bad Book of Botany introduces a world of wild, wonderful, and weird plants. Some are so rare, they were once more valuable than gold. Some found in ancient mythology hold magical abilities, including the power to turn a person to stone. Others have been used by assassins to kill kings, and sorcerers to revive the dead. Here, too, is vegetation with astonishing properties to cure and heal, many of which have long since been lost with the advent of modern medicine. Organized alphabetically, The Big, Bad Book of Botany combines the latest in biological information with bizarre facts about the plant kingdom’s oddest members, including a species that is more poisonous than a cobra and a prehistoric plant that actually “walked.” Largo takes you through the history of vegetables and fruits and their astonishing agricultural evolution. Throughout, he reveals astonishing facts, from where the world’s first tree grew to whether plants are telepathic. Featuring more than 150 photographs and illustrations, The Big, Bad Book of Botany is a fascinating, fun A-to-Z encyclopedia for all ages that will transform the way we look at the natural world.

The Botany of Desire

The Botany of Desire PDF

Author: Michael Pollan

Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks

Published: 2002-05-28

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0375760393

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“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?

Principles of Botany

Principles of Botany PDF

Author: Salem Press

Publisher: Salem Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 9781642653915

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Fully explores the wide world of botany - the branch of biology that studies the plant kingdom, including physiology, structure, genetics, ecology, distribution, and classification of all plants, as well as how they interact with their environment.

Plants as Persons

Plants as Persons PDF

Author: Matthew Hall

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2011-05-06

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1438434308

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Plants are people too? No, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought as well as modern science for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipeints of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them.

Gut Botany

Gut Botany PDF

Author: Petra Kuppers

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2020-03-03

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13: 0814347649

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Poetry that inhabits and queers bodies and lands in an ecosomatic investigation.

Ethnobotany

Ethnobotany PDF

Author: Paul E. Minnis

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 9780806131801

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This reader in ethnobotany includes fourteen chapters organized in four parts. Paul Minnis provides a general introduction; the authors of the section introductions are Catherine S. Foeler (ethnoecology), Cecil H. Brown (folk classification), Timothy Jones (foods and medicines), and Richard I. Ford (agriculture). Ethnobotany: A Reader is intended for use as a textbook in upper division undergraduate and graduate courses in economic botany, ethnobotany, and human ecology. The book brings together for the first time previously published journal articles that provide diverse perspectives on a wide variety of topics in ethnobotany. Contributors include: Janis B. Alcorn, M. Kat Anderson, Stephen B. Brush, Robert A. Bye, George F. Estabrook, David H. French, Eugene S. Hunn, Charles F. Hutchinson, Eric Mellink, Paul E. Minnis, Brian Morris, Gary P. Nabhan, Amadeo M. Rea, Karen L. Reichhardt, Jan Timbrook, Nancy J. Turner, and Robert A. Voeks.