Reader's Place: July 1, 2022
BOOKS ABOUT WRITERS, PLANTS AND GARDENING
It should surprise absolutely no-one that the Venn diagrams of avid readers/writers and gardeners intersect. Both activities are best done in solitude, and require imagination and patience.
Orwell's roses, by Rebecca Solnit, 2021. (Catalog, Ebook)
A fresh take on George Orwell as a far more nature-loving figure than is often portrayed, and a dazzlingly rich meditation on roses, gardens, and the value and use of beauty and pleasure in the face of brutality and horror. Journeying to the cottage in Wallingford where Orwell lived in 1936, Solnit examines his desire to be agrarian and settled, how gardening restored him, and how planting something can be an act of fidelity and faith.
Guardians of the trees: A journey of hope through healing the planet, by Kinari Webb, 2021. (Catalog)
When Webb first traveled to Indonesian Borneo at 21 to study orangutans, she was both awestruck by the beauty of her surroundings and heartbroken by the rainforest destruction she witnessed. As she got to know the local communities, she realized that their need to pay for expensive healthcare led directly to the rampant logging, which in turn imperiled their health and safety even further. After graduating with honors from the Yale School of Medicine, Webb returned to Borneo, listening to local communities about their solutions for how to both protect the rainforests and improve their lives.
The plant hunter: a scientist's quest for nature's next medicines, by Cassandra Leah Quave, 2021. (Catalog, Ebook)
A leading medical ethnobotanist tells us the story of her quest to develop new ways to fight illness and disease through the healing powers of plants. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida, the rolling hills of central Italy, isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo, and volcanic isles arising out of the Mediterranean - all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers, that could help save us all from the looming crisis of untreatable superbugs.
Bedside companion for gardeners: an anthology of garden writing for every night of the year, edited by Jane McMorland Hunter. (Catalog)
To quote the author, “Pieces of poetry and prose, fact and fiction, practical advice and wildly impractical ideas [gleaned from English–language authors, and the King James Bible] are collected together here, with one piece for every night of the year.”
Compiled by Ina Rimpau