Parallel botany - Hardcover

Lionni, Leo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394410556 ISBN 13: 9780394410555

Publisher: Knopf, 1977

Synopsis

Dust jacket notes: "With precision with authority, with wit, with the ineffable brilliance of supreme scholarship, Leo Lionni here presents the first full-scale guide to the world of parallel plants -- a vast, ramified, extremely peculiar, and wholly imaginary plant kingdom. It is a botany alive with wonders, from the Tirillus silvador of the high Andes (whose habit it is to emit shrill whistles on clear nights in January and February) to the Woodland Tweezers (it was the Japanese parallel botanist Uchigaki who first noticed the unsettling relationship between the growth pattern of a group of Tweezers and a winning ' layout in a game of Go) to the Artisia (whose various forms anticipate the work of such artists as Arp and Calder -- and, some believe, the work of all artists, including those not yet born). Yet for all its delights, it is a plant world hitherto ignored by the entire scientific community, possibly because it is nonexistent. In this masterful work Lionni marshals all the facts, all the fabulous lore and scholarship surrounding parallel plants. He deals forthrightly with the vexing philosophical, linguistic, and ethnological questions that plague parallel botanists -- for example, what is 'organicity'? Can one plant be 'more parallel' than another? How are we to reconcile the views expressed by Adolf Boehmen in his book Notes Toward a Vegetable Semantics? Lionni tells tales of the great parallel plant hunters, notably Madame Jeanne Helene Bigny, the famous paleobotanist who discovered fossil Tirils in the desert of eastern Luristan by parapsychological means. He furnishes full transcriptions of legends and folk tales relating to parallel plants from all over the globe -- Siberia, Africa, the South Pacific -- as well as the most recent information that has come to him regarding plant origins, distribution, and morphology. And, too, he provides his own elegant, detailed, and scientifically accurate drawings...

About this title

Language Notes:

Text: English, Italian (translation)

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1977
• ISBN 10: 0394410556
• ISBN 13: 9780394410555
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 181