The leading American botanist of the nineteenth century, Asa Gray helped organize the main generalizations of the science of plant geography. The manual of botany that carries his name is still in use today. Friend and confidant of Charles Darwin, Gray became the most persistent and effective American protagonist of Darwin's views. Yet at the same time, he believed that religion and Darwin's theory of natural selection could coexist. A. Hunter Dupree's authoritative biography offers the first full-length interpretation of one of America's most important men of science.

The history of plants and flowers.

Botanical paintings and fascinating essays are combined in Plant Discoveries to examine the fascinating history of plants and flowers. Over 20 plant families are profiled including cacti, daffodils, iris, magnolia, poppies, roses, tulips, conifers, hibiscus, palms and waterlilies.

Throughout history, plants have dramatically affected the lives of individuals and society as a whole. Holland's infamous tulip craze is now legend. The 17th century spice trade was so profitable that stevedores who unloaded nutmeg from the boats were obliged to wear coveralls without pockets since only a few nutmegs were worth a fortune.

The natural history of the plants themselves is an engrossing topic. The book suggests that plants take a more active role in their survival than commonly assumed. It discusses how plants have adopted remarkable strategies for survival in a variety of harsh habitats. One such plant is the dead horse arum -- a putrid-smelling plant that adapted to compete with dead birds to attract pollinating carrion flies.

Plants that gardeners now take for granted once could only be found in remote and hostile regions. Plant Discoveries tells the fascinating story of the adventurous botanist explorers who braved disease, slave traders, war, jungles and other dangers to collect plants now commonly grown in our own backyards.

These pages are graced with hundreds of stunning color illustrations selected from the vast collection of botanical paintings archived at the Natural History Museum, London. Plant Discoveries is an exciting voyage of discovery and a must-have volume for lovers of art, botany, and adventure.

Ruiz spent 11 years exploring the villages and botanical landscapes of Peru and Chile. His journals contain detailed, personal observations of about 2000 plants, along with his impressions of the culture and perils of exploration in South America.

First published in 1913, this volume reproduces a series of lectures on influential botanists delivered in 1911 in the Botanical Department of University College, London. The subjects of these biographies include Sir William Hooker (1785-1865), the first Director of Kew, and John Ray (1627-1705), considered the founder of scientific botany in Britain. The biographies are written by distinguished botanists of the period, over half of them holding a university professorship and membership of the Royal Society. Edited by F. W. Oliver (1864-1951), Professor of Botany at University College, London, from 1890 to 1929, these essays provide information on the lives, and discuss the scientific contributions, of each botanist, each contributor specialising in the same area of botany as the subject. The wide range of subjects covered demonstrates the development of key botanical concepts and the growth of scientific botany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the mid-1860s, grapevines in southeastern France inexplicably began to wither and die. Jules-Émile Planchon, a botanist from Montpellier, was sent to investigate. He discovered that the vine roots were covered in microscopic yellow insects. What they were and where they had come from was a mystery. The infestation advanced with the relentlessness of an invading army and within a few years had spread across Europe, from Portugal to the Crimea. The wine industry was on the brink of disaster. The French government offered a prize of three hundred thousand gold francs for a remedy. Planchon believed he had the answer and set out to prove it.

Gripping and intoxicating, The Botanist and the Vintner brings to life one of the most significant, though little-known, events in the history of wine.

In the mid-1860s, after countless centuries of bearing the fruit that would become wine, French grapevines began to wither and die in ever increasing numbers and no one knew why. It started in southeastern France, in the Rhone Valley, as Christy Campbell tells the tale in his masterful The Botanist and the Vintner. Within 30 years the inexorable rolling disaster that was the phylloxera infestation had reached into every nook and cranny of France's wine making regions, destroying nearly all. Everywhere the wine grape grew--England, Spain, Italy, Germany, Eastern Europe, and even Australia--phylloxera appeared and took no prisoners. Except for American grape vines. The little bug didn't seem to have much taste for the skunky wines of native American grapes.

Christy Campbell, British journalist and, if The Botanist and the Vintner is any example, master storyteller, waltzes the reader into the middle of a fascinating tale of discovery and combat and never stops dancing. The book reads like a detective novel, a page-turner you can't put down. And it's about a bug, phylloxera, a root-sucking aphid that absolutely wiped clean the grand vineyards of France and thrived in defiance of both peasant remedy and all that "modern" science could bring to bear.

The modern science of the time, mind you, included debating Darwin's new theory of evolution. So it's really at the beginning of discovery and scientific technique. Despite a French government prize of 300,000 gold francs for a remedy, it took 30 years and more to pinpoint the reason for the vineyard die-off, and a practical way of defeating the organism. Grafting onto American rootstock – a rootstock that was the initial cause of the disaster – won the day though not the reward.

Campbell both begins and ends his tale in California's Napa Valley, where phylloxera once again raised its nasty little head toward the end of the 20th century, about 100 years after the struggle in France. It cost millions of dollars to bring the bug to bear. But this time part of the solution turned in a transgenic direction which is, of course, a threat with a completely different vintage. --Schuyler Ingle

Hephaestus Books represents a new publishing paradigm, allowing disparate content sources to be curated into cohesive, relevant, and informative books. To date, this content has been curated from Wikipedia articles and images under Creative Commons licensing, although as Hephaestus Books continues to increase in scope and dimension, more licensed and public domain content is being added. We believe books such as this represent a new and exciting lexicon in the sharing of human knowledge. This particular book is a collaboration focused on Botanists active in the Pacific.

Reporting on Amsterdam’s famous Cannabis Cup competition for the Los Angeles Times, novelist Mark Haskell Smith sampled a variety of marijuana that was unlike anything he’d experienced. It wasn’t anything like typical stoner weed—in fact it didn’t get you stoned. This cannabis possessed an ephemeral quality known to aficionados as “dankness.”
 
Armed with a State of California Medical Marijuana recommendation, he begins a journey into the international underground where super-high-grade marijuana is developed, and tracks down the ragtag community of underground botanists, outlaw farmers, and renegade strain hunters who pursue excellence and diversity in marijuana, defying the law to find new flavors, tastes, and effects. This unrelenting pursuit of dankness climaxes at the Super Bowl/Mardi Gras of the marijuana world, the international blind tasting competition held annually in Amsterdam known as the Cannabis Cup, an event that determines the market value of the world's largest cash crop.