Jewels of the Plains

Jewels of the Plains PDF Author: Claude A. Barr
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452945233
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
From Abronia to Zinnia, Jewels of the Plains describes the natural history and garden merits of more than five hundred Great Plains wildflowers. Considered the authoritative guide by native plant enthusiasts and horticulturists, it captures the unique beauty, resilience, and variety of wildflowers in the Great Plains. Claude A. Barr did not set out to be a writer. In 1910, he homesteaded 160 acres of prairie in the southwest corner of South Dakota, intending to become a farmer. Despite challenging conditions, Barr fell in love with the land and its native flora. He began contributing profiles of plains wildflowers to gardening magazines, which precipitated requests for seed and led him to start a mail-order nursery, Prairie Gem Ranch. What began as a Depression-era sideline eventually gained a worldwide clientele, and Barr became a respected ambassador for the wildflowers of this part of the American landscape. Decades of observing plants in the wild and growing them for his nursery, as well as careful study of scientific sources, gave Barr unequaled knowledge that culminated in this acclaimed book. Wonderfully written and deeply researched, Jewels of the Plains is more than a field guide or how-to manual. It’s a pioneering text on native plant horticulture that details plant life on the prairie in the voice of one with intimate familiarity with the subject. Each description reads like a mini nature essay, giving insight into both the plants and Barr’s engaging personality. Edited to incorporate new scientific information, this edition includes an Introduction and supplemental notes by botanist and horticulturalist James H. Locklear. He places Barr’s remarkable life and work in historic and scientific context, illuminating his accomplishments from a fresh perspective.

Jewels of the Plains

Jewels of the Plains PDF Author: Claude A. Barr
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452945233
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 399

Get Book Here

Book Description
From Abronia to Zinnia, Jewels of the Plains describes the natural history and garden merits of more than five hundred Great Plains wildflowers. Considered the authoritative guide by native plant enthusiasts and horticulturists, it captures the unique beauty, resilience, and variety of wildflowers in the Great Plains. Claude A. Barr did not set out to be a writer. In 1910, he homesteaded 160 acres of prairie in the southwest corner of South Dakota, intending to become a farmer. Despite challenging conditions, Barr fell in love with the land and its native flora. He began contributing profiles of plains wildflowers to gardening magazines, which precipitated requests for seed and led him to start a mail-order nursery, Prairie Gem Ranch. What began as a Depression-era sideline eventually gained a worldwide clientele, and Barr became a respected ambassador for the wildflowers of this part of the American landscape. Decades of observing plants in the wild and growing them for his nursery, as well as careful study of scientific sources, gave Barr unequaled knowledge that culminated in this acclaimed book. Wonderfully written and deeply researched, Jewels of the Plains is more than a field guide or how-to manual. It’s a pioneering text on native plant horticulture that details plant life on the prairie in the voice of one with intimate familiarity with the subject. Each description reads like a mini nature essay, giving insight into both the plants and Barr’s engaging personality. Edited to incorporate new scientific information, this edition includes an Introduction and supplemental notes by botanist and horticulturalist James H. Locklear. He places Barr’s remarkable life and work in historic and scientific context, illuminating his accomplishments from a fresh perspective.

Jewels

Jewels PDF Author: Victoria Finlay
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0345493354
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Throughout history, precious stones have inspired passions and poetry, quests and curses, sacred writings and unsacred actions. In this scintillating book, journalist Victoria Finlay embarks on her own globe-circling search for the real stories behind some of the gems we prize most. Blending adventure travel, geology, exciting new research, and her own irresistible charm, Finlay has fashioned a treasure hunt for some of the most valuable, glamorous, and mysterious substances on earth. With the same intense curiosity and narrative flair she displayed in her widely-praised book Color, Finlay journeys from the underground opal churches of outback Australia to the once pearl-rich rivers of Scotland; from the peridot mines on an Apache reservation in Arizona to the remote ruby mines in the mountains of northern Burma. She risks confronting scorpions to crawl through Cleopatra’s long-deserted emerald mines, tries her hand at gem cutting in the dusty Sri Lankan city where Marco Polo bartered for sapphires, and investigates a rumor that fifty years ago most of the world’s amber was mined by prisoners in a Soviet gulag. Jewels is a unique and often exhilarating voyage through history, across cultures, deep into the earth’s mantle, and up to the glittering heights of fame, power, and wealth. From the fabled curse of the Hope Diamond, to the disturbing truths about how pearls are cultured, to the peasants who were once executed for carrying amber to the centuries-old quest by magicians and scientists to make a perfect diamond, Jewels tells dazzling stories with a wonderment and brilliance truly worthy of its subjects.

A Naturalist’s Guide to the Great Plains

A Naturalist’s Guide to the Great Plains PDF Author: Paul A. Johnsgard
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1609621263
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
This book documents nearly 500 US and Canadian locations where wildlife refuges, nature preserves, and similar properties protect natural sites that lie within the North American Great Plains, from Canada's Prairie Provinces to the Texas-Mexico border. Information on site location, size, biological diversity, and the presence of especially rare or interesting flora and fauna are mentioned, as well as driving directions, mailing addresses, and phone numbers or internet addresses, as available. US federal sites include 11 national grasslands, 13 national parks, 16 national monuments, and more than 70 national wildlife refuges. State properties include nearly 100 state parks and wildlife management areas. Also included are about 60 national and provincial parks, national wildlife areas, and migratory bird sanctuaries in Canada's Prairie Provinces. Many public-access properties owned by counties, towns, and private organizations are also described.

Jewels of the Plains

Jewels of the Plains PDF Author: Claude A. Barr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781452945224
Category : NATURE
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


Plains of Promise

Plains of Promise PDF Author: Alexis Wright
Publisher: Univ. of Queensland Press
ISBN: 0702267392
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In this brilliant debut novel, Alexis Wright evokes city and outback, deepening our understanding of human ambition and failure, and making the timeless heart and soul of this country pulsate on the page. Black and white cultures collide in a thousand ways as Aboriginal spirituality clashes with the complex brutality of colonisation at St Dominic's mission. With her political awareness raised by work with the city-based Aboriginal Coalition, Mary visits the old mission in the northern Gulf country, place of her mother's and grand-mother's suffering. Mary's return re-ignites community anxieties, and the Council of Elders again turn to their spirit world.

Bad Land

Bad Land PDF Author: Jonathan Raban
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307798445
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • Startlingly observed, beautifully written, this book is a contemporary classic of the American West. • "As good a book as I have read about rural America in a very long time." —The New York Times Book Review In 1909 maps still identified eastern Montana as the Great American Desert. But in that year Congress, lobbied heavily by railroad companies, offered 320-acre tracts of land to anyone bold or foolish enough to stake a claim to them. Drawn by shamelessly inventive brochures, countless homesteaders—many of them immigrants—went west to make their fortunes. Most failed. In Bad Land, Jonathan Raban travels through the unforgiving country that was the scene of their dreams and undoing, and makes their story come miraculously alive. In towns named Terry, Calypso, and Ismay (which changed its name to Joe, Montana, in an effort to attract football fans), and in the landscape in between, Raban unearths a vanished episode of American history, with its own ruins, its own heroes and heroines, its own hopeful myths and bitter memories.

Annual Report ...

Annual Report ... PDF Author: Woman's Home Missionary Society (Cincinnati, Ohio)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description


Jewels of the Plains

Jewels of the Plains PDF Author: Claude A. Barr
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780816611270
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Describes the Great Plains region, looks at the characteristics of native flowering plants, and offers tips on growing each species

High and Dry

High and Dry PDF Author: Robert Nold
Publisher: Timber Press
ISBN: 0881928720
Category : Gardening
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
Leavened with humor and rueful wisdom, Nold's pithy descriptions zero in on each plant's outstanding ornamental characteristics while giving the reader an accurate idea of what to expect from the plant's performance in the garden." "Although Nold addresses himself primarily to western gardeners, anyone with an interest in hardy, drought-tolerant plants will find in these pages an abundance of tempting possibilities with which to experiment."--BOOK JACKET.

The Texas Panhandle Frontier

The Texas Panhandle Frontier PDF Author: Frederick W. Rathjen
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
ISBN: 9780896723993
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The Texas Panhandle-its eastern edge descending sharply from the plains into the canyons of Palo Duro, Tule, Quitaque, Casa Blanca, and Yellow House-is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Long considered a crossroads of ancient civilizations, the twenty-six northernmost Texas counties lie on the southern reaches of the Great Plains, w...