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...
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...
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: 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...