Flowering Earth - Softcover

Peattie, Donald Culross

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253206626 ISBN 13: 9780253206626

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Even a diehard urbanite would likely be seduced by this extraordinary chronicle of the plant kingdom... " ―Publishers Weekly

... much more than the fascinating story of plant life... It is also a book about the resilience of life itself, the mystery and power of the unseen energy appearing in the visible world in a marvelous variety of forms." ―Audubon Naturalist News

Here is Mr. Peattie at his superb best.... [H]e makes the story of botany and its pursuit as fascinating to the reader as it is to him, and the reading of it a delight." ―Hartford Times

[Peattie] belongs with Gilbert White, Thoreau, John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jeffries, and John Muir." ―Mark van Doren

First published in 1939, this beautifully imaginative book is about botany much in the same sense that Walden is about a pond. Part natural history, part biography, and part philosophical reflection, Flowering Earth is written in a warm, lyrical style that made poet-scientist Donald Culross Peattie one of America's best-known naturalist writers.

About this title

From 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.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0253206626
• ISBN 13: 9780253206626
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 276