‘What’s in a name? That which we call a Rose By any other name would smell as sweet.’ William Shakespeare The great William Guilfoyle, credited as the architect of Melbourne’s Royal Botanic gardens, was an eminent landscape designer, botanist and writer. Here are his collected writings on the dozens of plants, fruits and flowers William Shakespeare referred to in his plays and poems. Each entry is accompanied by Basilius Besler’s groundbreaking illustrations and delicate watercolours by Jacques le Morgues. Shakespearian Botany is a feast for those who love the bard, gardens and art. It is the first in the Mr Guilfoyle trilogy. Mr Guilfoyle’s Honeymoon: The Gardens of Europe & Great Britain and Mr Guilfoyle’s South Sea Islands Adventure on HMS Challenger will be published in 2019.

Plants produce a huge array of natural products (secondary metabolites). These compounds have important ecological functions, providing protection against attack by herbivores and microbes and serving as attractants for pollinators and seed-dispersing agents. They may also contribute to competition and invasiveness by suppressing the growth of neighboring plant species (a phenomenon known as allelopathy). Humans exploit natural products as sources of drugs, flavoring agents, fragrances and for a wide range of other applications. Rapid progress has been made in recent years in understanding natural product synthesis, regulation and function and the evolution of metabolic diversity. It is timely to bring this information together with contemporary advances in chemistry, plant biology, ecology, agronomy and human health to provide a comprehensive guide to plant-derived natural products. Plant-derived natural products: synthesis, function and application provides an informative and accessible overview of the different facets of the field, ranging from an introduction to the different classes of natural products through developments in natural product chemistry and biology to ecological interactions and the significance of plant-derived natural products for humans. In the final section of the book a series of chapters on new trends covers metabolic engineering, genome-wide approaches, the metabolic consequences of genetic modification, developments in traditional medicines and nutraceuticals, natural products as leads for drug discovery and novel non-food crops.

Discover the inspiration for the famed redesign of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne. It was the young William Guilfoyle’s botanical tour of the South Sea Islands in 1868 that provided his vision for the one of the world’s great public parks. Share his excitement of discovering and collecting tropical plants, giving the local cannibals a very wide berth and being an eyewitness to an uprising in Fiji. Here is an unprecedented armchair view of the riches of this region by an emerging botanist who would later transform our understanding of garden design. Mr Guilfoyle’s South Sea Islands Adventure on HMS Challenger is Guilfoyle’s detailed account of the four months he spent exploring Samoa, the Friendly Islands, Fiji, the New Hebrides and New Caledonia. It is the final book of a glorious trilogy—Mr Guilfoyle’s Shakespearian Botany and Mr Guilfoyle’s Honeymoon, The Gardens of Europe & Great Britain—which illuminates the extraordinary genius of William Guilfoyle, botanist, landscape designer, artist and writer.

'We are all Zapatistas.' Subcomandante MarcosThis book began in 1994, when Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos replied to a 10-year-old girl from Mexico City who had sent him a drawing. The ensuing collection of related tales about the warrior-beetle, narrated by his pipe-smoking, black-ski-masked human squire is an extraordinary account for the general reader of current global political struggle.Marcos created a humorous fictitious character, Don Durito, a beetle with Quixotic fantasies which regards Marcos as his Sancho Panza. In this book, Marcos creates a new political genre, so-called "postdata": ironical commentaries which he affixes to his formal communiqués or declarations. In one of them he even offers to perform a striptease for government negotiators.'We are the product of 500 years of struggle...They [Mexican government] don't care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over our heads; no land, no work, no health care, no food, no education... nor is there peace nor justice for ourselves and our children. But today, we say ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!' First EZLN declaration of war, December 31st 1993The Zapatistas are not Marxist, Rightists, or Anarchists. They seek not to replace one infrastructure of power with another, thus rejecting the normal goal of an armed struggle. They are armed but do not use violence as a tool to expand their aims. Although a localized rebellion, the Zapatistas are unified in a worldwide struggle that transcends the mainstream media's limited perspective through eloquent dictations distributed globally via the Internet.With a fresh perspective and tactics that have never been seen in relation to an armed insurrection, the EZLN (Zapatista National Liberation Army) has changed the definition of what revolution means. From the marginalized confines of the poorest region in Mexico, a new concept of revolutionary change with a new solution to societies woes is currently being proposed.