How Flowers Changed the World PDF Download

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: 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: Beronda L. Montgomery
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674259394
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
An exploration of how plant behavior and adaptation offer valuable insights for human thriving. We know that plants are important. They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms and supply psychological benefits to humans as well, improving our moods and beautifying the landscape around us. But plants don’t just passively provide. They also take action. Beronda L. Montgomery explores the vigorous, creative lives of organisms often treated as static and predictable. In fact, plants are masters of adaptation. They “know” what and who they are, and they use this knowledge to make a way in the world. Plants experience a kind of sensation that does not require eyes or ears. They distinguish kin, friend, and foe, and they are able to respond to ecological competition despite lacking the capacity of fight-or-flight. Plants are even capable of transformative behaviors that allow them to maximize their chances of survival in a dynamic and sometimes unfriendly environment. Lessons from Plants enters into the depth of botanic experience and shows how we might improve human society by better appreciating not just what plants give us but also how they achieve their own purposes. What would it mean to learn from these organisms, to become more aware of our environments and to adapt to our own worlds by calling on perception and awareness? Montgomery’s meditative study puts before us a question with the power to reframe the way we live: What would a plant do?

Author: Loren C. Eiseley
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156849098
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
A collection of the author's favorite essays and poems. This volume includes selections that span Eiseley's entire writing career and provide a sampling of the author as naturalist, poet, scientist, and humanist. "Loren Eiseley's work changed my life" (Ray Bradbury). Introduction by W. H. Auden.

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: Katie Hess
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 140194826X
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
Flowerevolution is part traditional guidebook, part “choose-your-own-adventure”. From a stunning array of flower photographs, readers can choose the flowers they’re most attracted to, and based on those choices discover an interactive system that reveals their state of mind. The book provides specific questions for reflection and action steps to catalyze transformation in their lives. Using flowers as teachers, they can rediscover how to find new insights about themselves and their world. In many ways, with the current advancements in technology, we’ve lost our connection to nature, and in turn, our connection to ourselves. This disconnection leads to stress, fatigue, and imbalance. In Flowerevolution, we will explore the vast and beautiful world of flowers and learn how flower elixirs can be used to help us bring nature back into our everyday modern lifestyles. Packed with information, stories, reflections, and rituals, this interactive book is designed to open up readers to a fresh new world of magic and possibility. Flowerevolution reveals the secret healing powers of flowers, including ancient and modern methods for harnessing their unique qualities, like flower rituals, flower baths, and special applications for flower elixirs. “Flowers only live for a week. This book will live in your heart forever —and that’s our gift to you.”

Author: Tracy Chevalier
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135314101
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 1032

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Book Description
This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies

Author: Rachel Ignotofsky
Publisher: Crown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 0593176502
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 25

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Book Description
From the creator of the New York Times bestseller Women in Science, comes a new nonfiction picture book series ready to grow young scientists by nurturing their curiosity about the natural world--starting with what's inside a flower. Budding backyard scientists can start exploring their world with this stunning introduction to these flowery show-stoppers--from seeds to roots to blooms. Learning how flowers grow gives kids beautiful building blocks of science and inquiry. In the launch of a new nonfiction picture book series, Rachel Ignotofsky's distinctive art style and engaging, informative text clearly answers any questions a child (or adult) could have about flowers.