Flowering Earth
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- £15.99
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- £15.99
Publisher Description
Flowering Earth is an extraordinary work in which Peattie explores the origin and significance of plant life with an unmatched sense of astonishment and reflection. According to The New York Times, his prose in Flowering Earth “is pervaded by a continuous sense of beauty and illuminative insight,” and Books hails it as a piece “for people who are refreshed by any sort of emancipation from the trivial…”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Even a diehard urbanite would likely be seduced by this extraordinary chronicle of the plant kingdom, originally published in 1939 and now back in print. The late Donald Peattie, a botanist and author ( Singing in the Wilderness: A Salute to John James Audubon ), meanders through the plant kingdom, recalling the marvels he has witnessed in vivid, evocative prose (``On icy peaks the sprawling crustose lichen clings where even a mountain goat would gasp and stumble'') and explaining the innards and workings of plants with clarity and imaginative images (``the pistil is in general shaped like a carafe or Chianti bottle, with a swollen base which is the ovary proper, containing the ovules or unfertilized egg cells''). He writes of plants that inspire awe, like the mighty Sequoia tree--``unimaginable titans . . . in their uplifted hands they permit the little modern birds . . . to nest and call''--and of more ordinary greens, from seaweed to conifers, but always with the same sense of wonder. Nor does he overlook the lowly weed. With typically wry humor, he observes, ``For me, a weed is a plant out of place.'' Illustrated with woodcuts of plants.
