Organized as a field guide, a literary anthology filled with classic and contemporary poems and essays inspired by wildflowers—perfect for writers, artists, and botanists alike American Wildflowers: A Literary Field Guide collects poems, essays, and letters from the 1700s to the present that focus on wildflowers and their place in our culture and in the natural world. Editor Susan Barba has curated a selection of plants and texts that celebrate diversity: There are foreign-born writers writing about American plants and American writers on non-native plants. There are rural writers with deep regional knowledge and urban writers who are intimately acquainted with the nature in their neighborhoods. There are female writers, Black writers, gay writers, indigenous writers. There are botanists like William Bartram, George Washington Carver, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, and horticultural writers like Neltje Blanchan and Eleanor Perényi. There are prose pieces by Aldo Leopold, Lydia Davis, and Aimee Nezhukumatathil. And most of all, there are poems: from Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams and T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, Lucille Clifton and Louise Glück, Natalie Diaz and Jericho Brown. The book includes exquisite watercolors by Leanne Shapton throughout and is organized by species and botanical family—think of it as a field guide to the literary imagination.

Excerpt from Field Book of American Wild Flowers: Being a Short Description of Their Character and Habits, a Concise Definition of Their Colors, and Incidental References to the Insects Which Assist in Their Fertilization quite recently, in a conversation about art with Mr. Fosdick, the artist, he remarked to me that those who followed our profession were legitimately and continually seeking after expression regardless of limitation. I have since thought this was a very happy truth. Perhaps, therefore, it is sufficient to account for the exist. Hence of a volume on our American ora, fully one half of which is pictures.

With the cooperation of the Dept. of Botany at the U. of Texas and the National Wildflower Research Ctr., Andrews does for wildflowers what she did for peppers in her Peppers: the Domesticated Capsicums-- namely combine her striking botanical art with an informative text to create a volume of both artistic and scientific value. She pairs 52 lovely American wildflowers with a treatise giving the common name, scientific name, family origin, range, description, bloom period, pollinators, habitat requirements, propagation, remarks and etymology, and references. 9.25x12". Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Now available in paperback, The Secrets of Wildflowers is destined to be an indispensable book for anyone who loves and admires the natural world. Few things in nature beautify the world more than wildflowers. Their countless colors and endless designs are found almost anywhere—from fields to woods, deserts to ponds, and even in junkyards, dumps, and cracks in the pavement. The Secrets of Wildflowers, Jack Sanders’s colorful tribute, is bursting with odd facts and wonderful superstitions about some of North America’s most beautiful and common plants. Reader's will find natural history, folklore, habitats, horticulture, ingenious uses past and present, origins of names, and even their literary pedigrees. Far richer and eminently more varied than any field guide, The Secrets of Wildflowers contains more than 100 species of North American wildflowers organized by blooming seasons. Wildflowers are not just pretty to look at; they are an essential part of our environment. How they grow and what they do are often overlooked, and how they have been used has largely been forgotten. They feed insects, birds, animals, and even humans. They hold and condition the soil, and they are used in modern medicines and natural remedies and appear throughout history in art and literature. The Secrets of Wildflowersprovides detailed information on more than one hundred representative species of North American wildflowers.

This volume presents a detailed description of more than thirty-five wildflower species of the Northeast, describing their colors, habitats, range, pollination, history, cultural lore, medicinal uses, and literary and artistic references. The spring-blooming wildflowers looked at range from old favorites to lesser-known species. Featuring more than 500 full-color photos in large-sized format, the book delves deep into the life histories, lore, and cultural uses of more than 35 plant species. The narrative covers topics such as the naming of wildflowers; the reasons for taxonomic changes; pollination of flowers and dispersal of seeds; uses by Native Americans; related species in other parts of the world; herbivores, plant pathogens, and pests; medicinal uses; and wildflower references in history, literature, and art. The photos capture the beauty of these plants and also illustrate the concepts discussed in the text.

"This volume spotlights some of the finest imagery of its kind. It features 120 plates by Mary E. Eaton, who was a staff illustrator of the New York Botanical Garden from 1911 to 1932. Also included are 8 illustrations by botanical illustrator E. J. Geske. The first-rate botanical illustrations remain fresh and attractive to the modern eye"--

Three interrelated sections of poetry which explore the primary importance of connection, between humans and with the natural world. In the first section, the poems are wide-ranging, exploring the acquisition of language, the ways in which the experience and distance embedded in language darken and threaten the qualities of a childhood spent close to the natural world. The second section consists of a series of prose poems titled Andranik. In these poems, a child is speaking with her grandfather who relates, in answer to her questioning, the details of his survival during the Armenian Genocide: his escape, the deaths of loved ones, forced marches, enslavement all punctuated by memories of an earlier, happier boyhood. The final section contains shorter lyric poems set mainly in New England, poems that explore the proximity of life and death, the complicity and interdependency of the individual in the collective, and the redemptive possibilities of sympathy.

"Field Book of Western Wild Flowers" by J. J. Thornber, Margaret Armstrong. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

A searching, timely ode to the earth.

"In photographs and text, describes hundreds of Texas wildflowers. The 400 photographs are arranged by color to aid identification. The book describes past and present uses of the plants, the stories behind their scientific and common names, their medicinal and toxic properties, Native American lore, and other interesting facts and stories"--Provided by publisher.