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Why Look At Plants?

Edited by Giovanni Aloi

“Look around. Whether you are now in your office, house or in a public space, it will not take long before something green will fall in your field of vision. Plants are around us more frequently than animals, in fact their presence is given for granted, although they fill our everyday lives with their silent but indispensable presence. Why look at plants? What is there to see, one may ask - an entire world, or nothing at all, one might answer; this entirely depends on your predisposition, just as much as to someone a mouse can be a pest and to someone else a pet.”
- Dr. Giovanni Aloi

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The Weight of a Petal - Ars Botanica

By Sita Reddy

"An incomparably rich feast of information and images about the men and women who have painted India's botanical riches, as well as their modern-day successors."- Pradip Krishen, environmentalist and author 

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Colours of Nature: Dyes from the Indian Subcontinent

By Jenny Balfour-Paul

Explore the world of dyeing in and around the Indian Subcontinent. From painting with natural dyes to the commercialisation of Indigo, the magazine covers it all.

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A Frayed History - The Journey of Cotton in India

By Meena Menon and Uzramma

Meena Menon and Uzramma take us through the fascinating history of cotton in India, examining its illustrious origins, its blood-stained colonial heritage, and the events that led to its current crisis. Amid the bleakness, the authors suggest a silver lining: reviving indigenous cotton—and the handloom industry that spun its fame. Through painstaking research, Menon and Uzramma show that with the right combination of friendly policies and championing the Indian cotton brand, it is possible to restore the fabric's past glory. This is an important book not just for the lovers of cotton but anyone concerned with the struggles of Indian agriculture in a brutal, fast-changing market.

Hortus Malabaricus

Hortus Malabaricus is a comprehensive treatise that deals with the properties of the flora of the Western Ghats region principally covering the areas now in the Indian states of Kerala, Karnataka and Goa.

Such Treasure and Rich Merchandize - Hortus Catalogue

From the Archives, National Centre for Biological Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore

The exhibit "Such Treasure and Rich Merchandize" at the National Center for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, provided fascinating glimpses into a little known chapter of the history of East-West interaction during the pre-colonial period. The exhibit presented botanical illustrations, prints, and maps from books published between 1543 and 1693, and highlighted the importance of Indian botanical knowledge to the science and history of the period. 

Beyond Morphology

Edited by Giovanni Aloi

“Artist George Gessert, author of the book Green Light, in which he explores the role that aesthetic preferences have played in bioart, opens this issue with the topic of divine animals and plants looking at the dynamics of domestication. In Autumn 2010 Antennae launched an experiment called The Silence of the Plants. Triggered by the publication of a newspaper article on the subject of plants and ethics featured on The New York Times, a challenging discussion amongst some of Antennae’s readers, contributors, and board members emerged.” - Dr. Giovanni Aloi

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The Chernobyl Herbarium

Written by Michael Marder

The readers are entrusted with thirty fragments of reflections, meditations, recollections, and images — one for each year that has passed since the explosion that rocked and destroyed a part of the Chernobyl nuclear power station in April 1986. The aesthetic visions, thoughts, and experiences that have made their way into this book hover in a grey region between the singular and self-enclosed, on the one hand, and the generally applicable and universal, on the other.

How Flowers Changed the World

Written by Loren Eiseley

This graceful essay on the pivotal role of flowers in human evolution is certain to delight those readers already familiar with Loren Eiseley and to find an audience among naturalists, gardeners, and lovers of flowers everywhere.

The Private Life of Plants

By David Attenborough

Based on the immensely popular six-part BBC program that aired in the United States during the fall of 1995, this book offers what writer/filmmaker David Attenborough is best known for delivering: an intimate view of the natural world wherein a multitude of miniature dramas unfold.

The Botany of Desire

By Michael Pollan

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship.

The Drunken Botanist

By Amy Stewart

Sake began with a grain of rice. Scotch emerged from barley, tequila from agave, rum from sugarcane, bourbon from corn. Thirsty yet?  In The Drunken Botanist, Amy Stewart explores the dizzying array of herbs, flowers, trees, fruits, and fungi that humans have, through ingenuity, inspiration, and sheer desperation, contrived to transform into alcohol over the centuries.

Weeds

By Richard Mabey

Weeds is a fascinating, eye-opening, and vastly entertaining appreciation of the natural world’s unappreciated wildflowers that will appeal to armchair gardeners, horticulturists, green-thumbs, all those who stop to smell the flowers.

The Cabaret of Plants

By Richard Mabey

A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, and beauty.

The Language of Plants

By Monica Gagliano

The Language of Plants brings together groundbreaking essays from across the disciplines to foster a dialogue between the biological sciences and the humanities and to reconsider our relation to the vegetal world in new ethical and political terms.

Opium City

By Amar Farooqui

The book explores links between the opium growing and trade of western India and the creation of early Victorian Bombay to show that opium was a crucial factor in the emergence of Bombay as a metropolis.

The Hidden Life of Trees

By Peter Wohlleben

Are trees social beings? In The Hidden Life of Trees forester and author Peter Wohlleben convincingly makes the case that, yes, the forest is a social network.

Cities and Canopies

By Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli

Native and imported, sacred and ordinary, culinary and floral, favourites of various kings and commoners over the centuries, trees are the most visible signs of nature in cities, fundamentally shaping their identities. Drawing on extensive research, Cities and Canopies is a book about both the specific and the general aspects of these gentle life-giving creatures.

The Botanic Garden

By Erasmus Darwin

The Botanic Garden is a set of two poems, The Economy of Vegetation and The Loves of the Plants, by the British poet and naturalist Erasmus Darwin.

Thoreau and the Language of Trees

By Richard Higgins

Trees were central to Henry David Thoreau’s creativity as a writer, his work as a naturalist, his thought, and his inner life. In this original book, Richard Higgins explores Thoreau’s deep connections to trees: his keen perception of them, the joy they gave him, the poetry he saw in them, his philosophical view of them, and how they fed his soul.

Plants are Terrible People

By Luke Ruggenberg

The garden is a strange place. Any gardener who's been around the hedge and back could tell you that. But never has it been more absurd than within these pages. Hold on for dear life with humorist and professional Plant Guy, Luke Ruggenberg, as he guides readers through a gauntlet of horticultural mischief, provoking laughter, commiseration, and rumination in turn.

The Revolutionary Genius of Plants

By Stefano Mancuso

Do plants have intelligence? Do they have memory? Are they better problem solvers than people? The Revolutionary Genius of Plants--a fascinating, paradigm-shifting work that upends everything you thought you knew about plants--makes a compelling scientific case that these and other astonishing ideas are all true.

Slime

By Ruth Kassinger

Say “algae” and most people think of pond scum. What they don’t know is that without algae, none of us would exist. In Slime we’ll meet the algae innovators working toward a sustainable future: from seaweed farmers in South Korea, to scientists using it to clean the dead zones in our waterways, to the entrepreneurs fighting to bring algae fuel and plastics to market.

The Book of Tea

By Okakura Kakuzo

The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō is a long essay linking the role of the tea drinking ceremony to the aesthetic and cultural aspects of Japanese life.

Plants: From Roots to Riches

By Kathy Willis and Carolyn Fry

Plants: From Roots to Riches is a tie-in to the landmark 25-part BBC Radio 4 series with Kew Gardens; it is packed with 200 images in both color and black and white from Kew's amazing archives, some never reproduced before.

Sex, Botany & Empire

By Patricia Fara

Enlightenment botany was replete with sexual symbolism―to the extent that many botanical textbooks were widely considered pornographic. Carl Linnaeus's controversial new system for classifying plants based on their sexual characteristics, as well as his use of language resonating with erotic allusions, provoked intense public debate over the morality of botanical study. Sex, Botany, and Empire explores the entwined destinies of these two men and how their influence served both science and imperialism.

Mendel in the Kitchen

By Nina Fedoroff

While some restaurants race to footnote menus, reassuring concerned gourmands that no genetically modified ingredients were used in the preparation of their food, starving populations around the world eagerly await the next harvest of scientifically improved crops. Mendel in the Kitchen provides a clear and balanced picture of this tangled, tricky (and very timely) topic.

The Vegetarian

By Han Kang

Yeong-hye is, in her husband’s opening words, “completely unremarkable in every way”. She is a reasonably diligent homemaker. Time ticks by, and the two of them get on with living their ordinary lives; but their ordinariness, it turns out, is more fragile than they realise. Things begin to fracture the day Yeong-hye throws away all the meat from the freezer and announces that henceforth she is going to be a vegetarian.

The Poisonwood Bible

By Barbara Kingsolver

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

Hothouse

By Brian Aldiss

The Sun is about to go Nova. Earth and Moon have ceased their axial rotation and present one face continuously to the sun. The bright side of Earth is covered with carnivorous forest. This is the Age of vegetables. Gren and his lady - not to mention the tummybelly men - journey to the even more terrifying Dark side. One of Aldiss' most famous and long-enduring novels, fast moving, packed with brilliant imagery.

Batman Arkham: Poison Ivy

By Detective Comics

Poison Ivy was once Dr. Pamela Lillian Isley, a young woman with a unique fascination with botany and toxicology. But then she was seduced and later experimented on by her mentor, Professor Jason Woodrue, also known as the super-villain Floronic Man. Now a constant thorn in Batman’s side, Poison Ivy uses the toxins in her bloodstream to make her touch fatal to whomever she chooses, giving her the ability to create pheromones that make men her slaves while she stops at nothing to ensure plant life will retake Earth.

The Beekeeper of Aleppo

By Christy Lefteri

Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo--until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. On the way, Nuri is sustained by the knowledge that waiting for them is Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has started an apiary and is teaching fellow refugees in Yorkshire to keep bees.

The Day of Triffids

By John Wyndham

In 1951 John Wyndham published his novel The Day of the Triffids to moderate acclaim. Fifty-two years later, this horrifying story is a science fiction classic, touted by The Times (London) as having “all the reality of a vividly realized nightmare.”