Continuing with the theme of enormous new books this week here in The Well-read Naturalist, the recently published “Aquatic Plants of Northern and Central Europe including Britain and Ireland” from Princeton University Press in their WILDGuides series is a tome that would indeed cause Neville Longbottom himself to sit up and take notice.
For readers of Prof. Maura Flannery’s superb long-running blog on the subject of herbaria, the simple statement “Prof. Maura Flannery has written a book on the history of herbaria” is a sufficient declaration to cause a run on copies at bookshops across the land. However for those not already among the readers of her blog, I hope these humble words I’ve here assembled will cause both regular readership of it as well as a run to your local bookshop.
As it’s now past the ides of January, I’ve recently been noticing quite a lot of snowdrops – in my Instagram feed. While it is possible to find them in my home area of northwest Oregon, it is really my friends in the United Kingdom who are best attuned to their appearance each year.
The common definition of a weed is a wild plant growing in a place where humans don’t want it to be growing. The problem with this – aside from it being astonishingly arrogant of us toward the complexity of the natural world – is that it is also short-sighted, in that there may well be, and very likely is, more to the plant in question growing where it is growing than we can readily perceive and understand.