How Flowers Changed the World PDF Download
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Author: Loren C. Eiseley
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
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.
Author: Loren C. Eiseley
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 48
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: William C. Burger
Publisher: Prometheus Books
ISBN: 1615922164
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 337
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Book Description
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.
Author: Stephen Buchmann
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476755523
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
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.
Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0375760393
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
“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?
Author: Charlotte Du Cann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781906120641
Category : Voyages and travels
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
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.
Author: Lincoln Taiz
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190490268
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 545
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Book Description
This book focuses on how the the scientific discovery of "plant sex" unfolded due to cultural biases, beliefs, and perceptions about plant reproduction. "Flora Unveiled" is a deep history of perceptions about plant gender and sexuality, from the Paleolithic to the nineteenth century. The evidence suggests that a plants-as-female gender bias both prevented the discovery of two sexes in plants until the late 17th century, and delayed its acceptance for another 150 years.
Author: Michael Pollan
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593296915
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
The instant New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos. Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
Author: Sixtine Dubly
Publisher: Assouline Publishing
ISBN: 1614285144
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 5
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Book Description
Be it a single delicate bud in a simple clear vase or an explosion of colorful blossoms, a brilliant bouquet accents an atmosphere and brightens the mood like nothing else. The beauty of flowers has inspired artists, designers, poets, and myriad other creators for centuries: the Dutch masters of the 1600s and impressionist painters from Manet to Van Gogh, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, botanical illustrator Georg Dionysius Ehret, even the inimitable Andy Warhol. Flowers: Art & Bouquets showcases a glorious profusion of floral images and interpretations across a spectrum of artistic media and time periods. Design writer Sixtine Dubly chronicles the evolution of floral design in this remarkable compendium, which also features stunning work by more than forty contemporary floral artists in London, Paris, and New York, from minimalist to elaborate. This treasury of gorgeous imagery blooms in resplendent color before the reader’s eyes.
Author: Jonathan Drori
Publisher: Laurence King Publishing
ISBN: 1399608789
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
An inspirational and beautifully illustrated book that tells the stories of 80 plants from around the globe. In his follow-up to the bestselling Around the World in 80 Trees, Jonathan Drori takes another trip across the globe, bringing to life the science of plants by revealing how their worlds are intricately entwined with our own history, culture and folklore. From the seemingly familiar tomato and dandelion to the eerie mandrake and Spanish 'moss' of Louisiana, each of these stories is full of surprises. Some have a troubling past, while others have ignited human creativity or enabled whole civilizations to flourish. With a colourful cast of characters all brought to life by illustrator Lucille Clerc, this is a botanical journey of beauty and brilliance. 'A beautiful celebration of the plants and flowers that surround us and a quiet call to arms for change' The Herald 'This charming and beautifully illustrated book takes readers on a voyage of discovery, exploring the many ingenious and surprising uses for plants in modern science and throughout history' Kew Magazine 'With beautiful illustrations from Lucille Clerc, this captivating book traverses the globe via plants: nettles in England, mangoes in India and tulips in the Netherlands' Daily Mail
Author: Londa Schiebinger
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674043278
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
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.
