Botany

Plants That Kill / Plants That Cure

April 28, 2020

It’s the age-old balance – pain and pleasure, sorrow and happiness, death and life; so many of the things of the world which bring about one are inextricably linked to the other, and even sometimes one and the same. For millennia, folk healers and herbalists, whose spheres of activity have developed, expanded, and diversified into those of physicians and pharmacists, while also still existing in modernized forms of traditional practice, as well as fields of more academic study such as ethnobotany, have sought for treatments and cures in the world of plants. And, in reference to the aforementioned balance, some of the plants so used, when prepared or employed differently, hold the power to take as well as preserve life.

Darwin’s Insectivorous Plants

February 12, 2020

“During the summer of 1860, I was surprised by finding how large a number of insects were caught by the leaves of the common sun-dew (Drosera rotundifolia) on a heath in Sussex. I had heard that insects were thus caught, but knew nothing further on the subject.”

So begins Charles Darwin’s book “Insectivorous Plants,” published in 1875, following fifteen years of work and study; a book that from its very first lines to its last testifies to the inexhaustible patience and curiosity of one of the world’s greatest naturalists. It is also a book, I am embarrassed to write, the existence of which I was wholly unaware until rather recently.

The Saguaro Cactus

February 9, 2020

It is difficult to imagine a more evocative botanical symbol of the Sonoran desert than the Saguaro cactus. Towering above other plants and animals around it, branching arms raised toward the sky in a posture reminiscent of the human gesture of both prayer and blessing, this giant of the Cactaceae family hold pride of place in both the ecology, as well as the mythology of post pre- and post-colonial human inhabitants, of the region.

The Gardener’s Botanical

January 21, 2020

Hold on to your gardening hats, my friends, because come late February, Princeton University Press is going to be publishing Dr. Ross Bayton’s “The Gardener’s Botanical: An Encyclopedia of Latin Plant Names.”

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