Scientists want to communicate their findings and their work means they have a well of novel discoveries, but their language can be so specialised that no one outside their field understands what they’re doing...
Category - Books
Alun Salt
Book Review – Pollination and Floral Ecology
Pat Willmer. 2011. Princeton University Press. £65. pp. 832. Any text book that tries to assess and summarise the whole of a multidisciplinary research field such as pollination ecology and floral biology is required to...
botanyone
Kew’s Global Kitchen Cookbook
Kew's Global Kitchen Cookbook is an illustrated celebration of the amazing variety of edible plants and how we can use them.
annbot
Alice in the Wonderland of plants…
Military campaigns are sometimes intended to display ‘shock’ and ‘awe’ to overcome the adversary. Well – and rather less militaristically – Yiannis Manetas’ book, Alice in the Land of...
Nigel Chaffey
What a Plant Knows by Daniel Chamovitz
If you’re looking to show doubters that plants are fascinating then a good starting point is Daniel Chamovitz‘s What a Plant Knows. I was a bit wary of the book at the title made it sound a bit twee. In fact...
Science of Discworld IV: Judgement Day by Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen
The Science of Discworld series is one of the more interesting ideas in popular science writing. The first came out in the late 90s when there was a fad for the Science of the X Files or the Physics of Star Trek books...
They live among us (or is it the other way around..?)
Plants and Habitats of European Cities is apparently the ‘first explicit comparative account of plant diversity in several cities worldwide’ and the changes therein as a consequence of urban development...
Blurring the boundaries between plants and people
The title of Matthew Hall’s 2011 tome, ‘Plants as persons’ may not give that much away (controversial and challenging though it is!). However, its sub-title, ‘a philosophical botany’ provides an inkling of what lies...
This Is Not A Science Book
The Geek Manifesto by Mark Henderson is a book which wears its heart on its sleeve. This is unashamedly a political book – a campaign. The author, Mark Henderson, is Head of Communications at the Wellcome Trust...
AJ Cann
“Me and My Plant” (book review)
Flower Council Holland. 2010. Me and My Plant. Uitgeverij Snor. £0.00 (hard back/PDF). People form relationships with many biological entities – other people, pets – and even non...
Uses and Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke: Its Ethnobotany as Hallucinogen, Perfume, Incense, and Medicine by Pennachio, Jefferson and Havens
Uses and Abuses of Plant-Derived Smoke is a book I stumbled upon while looking for something else. It's tempting to say it's a very niche subject; the authors say this is the first book on the topic. After reading the...
The Windup Girl
We don’t normally discuss works of fiction here, so why make an exception for Paolo Bacigalupi’s book, The Windup Girl? I was a big science fiction fan as a teenager, though I don’t think I’d...
Banking on future food security
Carolyn Fry, Sue Seddon and Gail Vines’ The last great plant hunt (2011, published by Kew Publishing at £25.00 in hardback) is difficult to categorise. Certainly, The Last Great Plant Hunt [hereafter referred to as...
Botanical terms – in words and pictures
How often have you come across a new – to you, the reader, that is! – term in a botanical text and wondered what it meant? Well, OK, maybe not that often, but when you do, how frequently have you then looked...
