Plant Science

Beginning with opium, the “joy plant,” which has been used for 10,000 years, Thomas Hager tells a captivating story of medicine. His subjects include the largely forgotten female pioneer who introduced smallpox inoculation to Britain, the infamous knockout drops, the first antibiotic, which saved countless lives, the first antipsychotic, which helped empty public mental hospitals, Viagra, statins, and the new frontier of monoclonal antibodies. This is a deep, wide-ranging, and wildly entertaining book.

Desperate to join the expedition searching for her mother and the other missing Botanists, Daisy and her friends abandon the safety of magical Mallowmarsh. Facing danger on the high seas, they find themselves pursued across the waves by ruthless Grim Reapers. But they will need help to defeat these dangerous enemies. Their greatest hope: to find the legendary Iffenwild, a mysterious city hidden beyond the sea and lost to time. New discoveries await, and a strange botanical magic stirs beneath the waves.

A tree and your pet look nothing alike, but they have one thing in common—they are both made up of cells. Cells are really small. You can see them only with a microscope.

Nick Gallows has one goal: prevent the Apocalypse. But time is running out faster than he can imagine, and the Forebears of Ingenga are closing in. To stand a chance, Nick must venture through the rift that unleashed unspeakable horrors upon his city. On the other side, he finds an arctic wasteland crawling with monsters and a fortress under siege—the stronghold of the elusive Black Witch that has haunted his dreams. Forced to fight through hundreds of thousands of savage creatures, Nick must decide if aiding the Witch is worth the risk.

Riley Black brings us back in time to prehistoric seas, swamps, forests, and savannas where critical moments in plant evolution unfolded. Each chapter stars plants and animals alike, underscoring how the interactions between species have helped shape the world we call home. As the chapters move upwards in time, Black guides listeners along the burgeoning trunk of the Tree of Life, stopping to appreciate branches of an evolutionary story that links the world we know with one we can only just perceive now through the silent stone, from ancient roots to the present.

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans, or shared with other beings—beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence.

Merging ancient healing techniques and cutting-edge science, Drs. Johnson and Plant team up to reveal new groundbreaking science of essential oils, including synergistic actions with cells, genes, and human health. The discoveries revealed in this book will revolutionize the essential oil space, further unlock the unlimited benefits of essential oils, and increase the capacity of humans to live long and healthy lives to their fullest potential. You will discover: • Synergies between essential oils, cells, genes, carrier oils, and medications. • Blending tips to create synergistic ...

Most gardeners realize that plants need to be fed but know little to nothing about the nature of the nutrients involved or how they get into plants. Teaming with Nutrients explains how nutrients move into plants and what both macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients do once inside. It shows organic gardeners how to provide these essentials.

Explore the strange and remarkable stories of poisonous and even deadly plants. Science, history, and true crime converge in an informative and exciting look at Mother Nature's ghoulish garden. From a hallucinogenic fungus linked to the Salem Witch Trials to the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother, learn how certain plants evolved toxicity to avoid being consumed by predators and became the predator on their own.

Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that mammals are more than tools. Forced to land on a planet they aren't prepared for, human colonists rely on their limited resources to survive. The planet provides a lush but inexplicable landscape—trees offer edible, addictive fruit one day and poison the next, while the ruins of an alien race are found entwined in the roots of a strange plant. Conflicts between generations arise as they struggle to understand one another and grapple with an unknowable alien intellect.

In 1848, the British East India Company, having lost its monopoly on the tea trade, engaged Robert Fortune, a Scottish gardener, botanist, and plant hunter, to make a clandestine trip into the interior of China - territory forbidden to foreigners - to steal the closely guarded secrets of tea horticulture and manufacturing. For All the Tea in China is the remarkable account of Fortune's journeys into China - a thrilling narrative that combines history, geography, botany, natural science, and old-fashioned adventure.

An accessible and compelling story of a scientist's discovery of plant communication and how it influenced her research and changed her life.

If the history of the Earth were compressed down to a year, our species would arise in the last thirty minutes or so of the final hour. But life itself is not such a late arrival: It has existed on Earth for something like 3.7 billion years—most of our planet’s history and over a quarter of the age of the universe (as far as we can tell). What have these organisms—bacteria, animals, plants, and the rest—done in all this time? In Living on Earth, the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith proposes a new way of understanding how the actions of living beings have shaped our planet.

Whether you're a curious explorer, a seasoned psychonaut, or someone seeking alternative paths to personal growth, "How to Grow Psilocybin Mushrooms at Home" is your essential companion on the path to unlocking the mysteries of magic mushrooms.

Don’t miss your opportunity to become happier and healthier as you learn from nature, connect with other people, get back to your roots, become more self-sufficient, and stop worrying about running out of food. Once you set out on this path, you will never look back.

Tobacco was first cultivated and enjoyed by the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, who used it for medicinal, religious, and social purposes long before the arrival of Columbus. But when Europeans began to colonize the American continents, it became something else entirely - a cultural touchstone of pleasure and success and a coveted commodity that would transform the world economy forever.

We live in a world of seeds. From our morning toast to the cotton in our clothes, they are quite literally the stuff and staff of life, supporting diets, economies, and civilizations around the globe. Just as the search for nutmeg and the humble peppercorn drove the Age of Discovery, so did coffee beans help fuel the Enlightenment and cottonseed help spark the Industrial Revolution. And from the fall of Rome to the Arab Spring, the fate of nations continues to hinge on the seeds of a Middle Eastern grass known as wheat.

In this wide-ranging and accessible new book, biologist-turned-perfumer Elise Vernon Pearlstine turns our human-centered perception of fragrance on its head and investigates plants' evolutionary reasons for creating aromatic molecules. Delving into themes of spirituality, wealth, power, addiction, royalty, fantasy, and more, Pearlstine uncovers the natural history of aromatic substances and their intersection with human culture and civilization.

Discover the plants and animals living in a tree....

The Plant Hunter's Atlas is a volume telling some of the most extraordinary tales of horticultural discovery and exploring the characters behind the stories. Taking in the world's inhabited continents and spanning the centuries, the stories range from tales of derring-do in the age of discovery to modern-day botanists working at the cutting-edge of science. The text explores how plant hunters have been inspired by everything from scientific curiosity to economic greed, and their own ingrained sense of adventure.