This book teaches readers how to identify plants--and their uses--within groups and families. Botany in a Day provides simple techniques for plant identification, plus line drawings that highlight family characteristics, and plant entries that discuss med

Explains the patterns method of plant identification, describing eight key patterns for recognizing more than 45,000 species of plants, and includes an illustrated reference guide to plant families.

Explains the patterns method of plant identification, describing seven key patterns for recognizing more than 45,000 species of plants, and includes an illustrated reference guide to plant families.

The story of a girl who paddles her canoe out to the tree islands to learn the plant traditions of her people is presented to help readers learn the patterns that will help them correctly match many species of plants to their proper families.

“Pollan shines a light on our own nature as well as on our implication in the natural world.” —The New York Times “A wry, informed pastoral.” —The New Yorker The book that helped make Michael Pollan, the New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, Cooked and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of the most trusted food experts in America 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. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

The Botanical Field Guide offers in symbol and keyword format a substantial overview of the plant world. Plants express life. They sustain the environment and feed humans and animals alike. For the conscious observer the plant becomes more than the sum of its parts. The plant can be experienced as an unfolding event that moves through the seasons from seed to leaf to flower to fruit and to seed again. Make this comprehensive and robust guide your steady companion, wherever you live, in city or country. Use it to look for details, to classify, to reference, to compare and to remember keywords for later research. Very soon your eyes will become more discerning and your discoveries will be a richly satisfying source of inspiration. Living with, understanding and respecting the omnipresent processes of Nature by way of personal, direct observation will help us adapt to and cope with the environmental changes that inevitably lie ahead.