Plants - General & Miscellaneous, Herbal Medicine, Plants - Edible & Medicinal, Natural Healing & Medicine, Flowers & Plants, Ornamental & Garden Plants
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Overview
From the oxygen we breathe to the food we eat to the roofs over our heads, we owe our entire existence to plants. Yet the gentle green world we encounter each day is not entirely friendly. Anne Ophelia Dowden explores, in clear and engaging text accompanied by glorious full-color paintings and precise black-and-white drawings, the poisons, the magic, and the medicines in our gardens and countrysides.Describes the physical characteristics and natural habitats of several varieties of plants, as well as their poisonous, medical, and magical properties.
Editorials
Karen Harvey
Dowden interweaves botany, history, and folklore in an engaging study of the physical properties and habitats of a variety of plants that have been important to humankind in magic or medicine or have been feared as poisons. Individual plants are highlighted in the profuse full-color and black-and-white illustrations, which are half the size of the actual living specimen. The reader may occasionally be confused by picture captions, some of which refer to plants illustrated on a facing page without adequately delineating the example being discussed. The author of several previous botanical volumes, Dowden broadens her scope here, making the book a nice complement to such titles as Lerner's "Moonseed and Mistletoe" (1988). By concentrating on the larger role particular plants have played in human history, she demonstrates one of the great ironies of nature: that which is beautiful may be deadly, and that which harms may also heal.Book Details
Published
June 1, 1994
Publisher
New York : HarperCollinsPublishers, c1994.
Pages
61
Format
Binding
ISBN
9780060208622