Remarkable Plants That Changed Our Lives
19.99 €
In stock
Remarkable Plants That Changed Our Lives
19.99 €
Plants are essential to human development: for millennia, they have provided us with food, shelter, clothing, transportation, and medicine. In this book, Helen and William Bynum—historians of science and medicine, as well as passionate gardeners—trace the history of human interactions with 80 key plants over the past 12,000 years. They begin with the first domesticated grains that laid the foundations of civilization (wheat, rice, and corn), devote the next section to the plants that shaped our material world—ships, shelters, clothing, and furniture (oak, flax, and cotton), and then move on to the commodity crops that radically influenced the global economy, colonialism, and postcolonialism, as well as our habits of consumption (tea, coffee, and sugarcane). From pumpkins and beans native to the Americas to African sorghum and yams, from Brazilian rubber to Chinese bamboo—the book's geographic scope is vast. This stunning publication, illustrated with unique antique drawings, engravings, lithographs and paintings from the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, will become a source of new knowledge and inspiration for anyone interested in history, anthropology and cultural studies, as well as botany, and for anyone who is not indifferent to the beauty and diversity of the flora.
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