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 of Schweppes’ tonic water (slimline variety). Arguably, that listing is ‘just the tonic’, which is also the title of […]
Tea leaves might not predict the future, but they have a powerful connection to our past.
Beauty is more than skin deep in this book explaining how plants function.
Mulberry by Peter Coles 2019. Reaktion Books Ltd. Arguably, the only thing you need to know about Mulberry by Peter Coles is that it’s a title in Reaktion Books’ Botanical series. Anyone who’s read my book appraisals should know what I think of that brilliant series of plant-based texts. For a reminder, please see my […]
(or Gardening to Save the Planet) On my every growing to-do list is create a wildlife-friendly garden, should I ever move house and have a garden. That’s not happening any time soon, but if you do have a garden and some spare time for whatever reason, then spending some of it with The Garden Jungle by Dave […]
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 wartime: It doesn’t deal with the myriad marvellous ways that plants defend […]
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 Thoughts. What a contrast it was to now be looking at Vickery’s Folk Flora by Roy Vickery. Its sub-title The A-Z […]
Vergil’s Green Thoughts: Plants, Humans, and the Divine by Rebecca Armstrong, 2019. Oxford University Press. When I first heard about Vergil’s Green Thoughts by Rebecca Armstrong, I was eager to obtain a review copy since it seemed to me to deal with matters of plants and people relevance, which deserved to be shared and promoted […]
The Extraordinary Story of the Apple by Barrie E. Juniper and David J. Mabberley 2019. Kew Publishing. Having recently read Robert Spengler’s Fruits from the sands (and Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire several years ago), I have some idea of the importance of the apple in the affairs of humankind. But, at best, those books […]
Fruit from the sands: The Silk Road origins of the food we eat by Robert N Spengler III, 2019. University of California Press. In the UK we are blessed with a wide variety and ready availability of fruits all year round in our shops. So commonplace and taken-for-granted is that, I suspect we rarely give […]
The Ethnobotany of Eden: Rethinking the Jungle Medicine Narrative by Robert Voeks 2018. University of Chicago Press. I suspect that most of us who’ve tried to impress upon others the importance of plants have at one time promoted the view that we need to conserve our green inheritance because the next cure for cancer – […]
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