Should any trees reincarnated as The Tree Book be pleased or offended?
Tag - ethnobotany
Nigel Chaffey
The seed sleuth, forensic botany goes veggie
The Seed Detective: Uncovering the secret histories of remarkable vegetables by Adam Alexander, 2022. Chelsea Green Publishing UK. What do you think of when seed banks are mentioned? Perhaps Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank...
An extraordinary book about trees (and people)
Nigel Chaffey reviews a book about Trees, but is there agreement about what a Tree is?
Australian animals might kill you, but the plants could cure you…
You can listen to this page as an audio file. Phytochemistry of Australia’s Tropical Rainforest: Medicinal potential of ancient plants by Cheryll J Williams, 2021. CSIRO Publishing/CABI. It is often remarked that...
This plant book is amazing
A book that considers not only how plants have nourished the body, but also the soul.
Welcome to the wonderful world of … weeds(!)
Plants despised today still have value, and this book explores their contribution to the British ecosystem.
The who, when, where of global plant discovery
A fascinating book is hampered by its approach to citations.
A new edition of an iconic ethnobotany text
Plants, People, and Culture: The Science of Ethnobotany, 2nd edition by Michael J Balick and Paul Alan Cox 2021. CRC Press Some books have an iconic status in their field. Take, for example, Balick and Cox’s 1996/7...
Plants that … CURE
Plants that cure: A natural history of the world’s most important medicinal plants* by Elizabeth A Dauncey and Melanie–Jayne R Howes, 2020. Kew Publishing. A few years ago Kew published a book about the deadly...
Traditional Ecological Knowledge: challenges and opportunities
On three out of four days of the Ecological Society of America’s (ESA) virtual conference earlier in August, there were workshops or symposiums about working with indigenous communities. Traditional Ecological Knowledge...
Juniper Kiss
Ethnobiologists consider their impact during and after the COVID-19 pandemic
A group of scientists with diverse backgrounds reached out to each other under unprecedented times and set out new goals for their own discipline.
The refreshing tale of gin-and-tonic (well, half of it…)
Just the tonic, by Kim Walker and Mark Nesbitt 2019. Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. What is: carbonated water, citric acid, sodium citrate, natural quinine, and aspartame? That is the declared list of ingredients in a can...
When plants go to war!
Plants go to war: A botanical history of World War II by Judith Sumner, 2019. McFarland & Co. Lest there be any doubt at the outset, this blog item is an appraisal of a book that looks at the role of plants in...
What real people think about plants
Vickery’s Folk Flora: An A-Z of the Folklore and Uses of British and Irish Plants by Roy Vickery, 2019. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. For the past several weeks I’ve been tackling Rebecca Armstrong’s Vergil’s Green...
