A witty and engaging history of the first botanists, interwoven
with stories of today's extraordinary plants found in the garden
and the lab
In Paradise Under Glass, Ruth Kassinger recounts with grace and
humor her journey from brown thumb to green, sharing the lessons
that she learned from building a home conservatory in the wake of a
devastating personal crisis.
In A Garden of Marvels, she extends the story. "This book was
born of a murder, a murder I committed," she begins. The victim was
a kumquat tree. Though she diligently did her best--watering,
fertilizing, repotting, and pruning--the plant turned brown and
brittle. Why did the kumquat die when other plants in the garden
that received the same attention thrived? she wondered. It was an
experience that offered invaluable insight.
While she knew the basic rules of caring for indoor plants,
Kassinger realized that she understood very little about plant
physiology--how roots, stems, leaves, and flowers actually
function. Determined not to repeat her failure, she set out to
learn the fundamentals of botany in order to become a better
gardener. A Garden of Marvels is the story of her wise and
enchanting odyssey to discover the secret life of plants.
Kassinger retraces the progress of the first
botanists--including a melancholy Italian anatomist, a renegade
French surgeon, a stuttering English minister, an obsessive German
schoolteacher, and Charles Darwin--who banished myths and
misunderstandings and discovered that flowers have sex, leaves eat
air, roots choose their food, and hormones make morning glories
climb fence posts. She goes out into the world as well, visiting
modern gardens, farms, and labs to discover the science behind
extraordinary plants like one-ton pumpkins, truly black petunias,
ferns that eat the arsenic in contaminated soil, biofuel grass that
grows twelve feet tall, and the world's only photosynthesizing
animal. Kassinger also introduces us to modern scientific research
that offers hope for combatting climate change and alleviating
world hunger.
She then transfers her insights to her own garden, where she
nurtures a "cocktail" tree that bears five kinds of fruit, cures an
ailing Buddha's Hand plant with beneficial fungi, and gets a tree
to text her when it's thirsty. Intertwining personal anecdotes,
accessible science, and little-known history, A Garden of Marvels
takes us on an eye-opening journey into Kassinger's garden--and
yours--offering us a new appreciation of this exquisite gift of
nature: "Our garden is more than a marvel. It's as close to a
miracle as there is on Earth."
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!