Around the World in 80 Plants

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Who knew that the milky sap from dandelions is similar to that of rubber trees, so much so that, in the 1930s, 260 square miles of Eastern Europe were dedicated to growing Russian dandelions successfully to produce rubber until the end of the Second World War? This goes through some sad histories and some amazing and some which has subtly been side lined in our collective histories. Jonathan Drori CBE is a Trustee of The Eden Project, an Ambassador for the WWF and was for nine years Trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and The Woodland Trust. I loved the writing style and interesting information about each plant - I often stopped to read a few sentences to my husband, or made sure to share some of it with him later.

If you read extensively on many subjects, then here's another fascinating book to add to your collection - you'll love this one. Lucille Clerc is a French illustrator who studied at ENSAAMA in Paris and Central Saint Martins in London.Ultimately, it was informative and fun at times, but I felt it lacked the focus of Around the World in 80 Trees, which I loved. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society and the Zoological Society of London, and a former documentary filmmaker with the BBC. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

For the Aztec civilization, medical treatment combined the use of plants with magic and religion; marigolds were part of the decoration and offerings at religious festivals, and deities were decorated with marigold garlands. Structured by continent, this book guides the reader around the world, dipping into the stories of the tiny, the towering, the parasitic and the submarine. For people who struggle to sit with a book, this is a great choice, as it is easy to sample in small tastes when you feel like it. US manufacturers are investigating and apparently there are dandelion latex tires available in Europe.I wonder what criteria Drori considered when picking his 80 plants to cover because he certainly covered the world and every continent - including the ocean! In a previous life at the BBC, he was Executive Producer of more than fifty prime-time science documentaries and popular series. Anyway, the author of this book seems just as enthusiastic about plants as I am and is very much involved in trying to save as many as possible despite current challenges such as habitat loss. I definitely love having these three books in my collection (the 3rd one, the one about birds, wasn't written by this author but was produced in the same way by the publisher so I consider them a series) and hope there will be more (about other animal families, for example).

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 PLANTS by Jonathan Drori is a brilliant and - thanks to Lucille Clerc - a beautiful book. Interestingly, every plant has its own character: some like to cooperate with animals or other plants to benefit (birds spreading seeds, for example), while others lie and cheat. No plant, nor animals or any other living thing on earth, exist solely for our benefit, and thus we have to treat them with due respect. I веке Плиний Старший называл папирус «товаром, дающим бессмертие», он, вероятно, имел в виду зависимость цивилизаций от письменного слова.

Maybe you'll just want to read up on one of the 80 plants or at other times get stuck into a geographic section.