The idea of this book is to help us reclaim and restore a hugely important part of our heritage: our plant medicine path. In some parts of the world plant medicine is still taught at the kitchen table, by the cooking fire, or in the fields, passed down from parent to child and woven through the fabric of the culture. In many places it has been severely eroded, but it has not been lost. Plants feed us most generously and give their medicine freely, and we have the right to reclaim our ability to use plant medicine, to restore our access to the knowledge and the plants themselves - not just for humans but for all species and ecosystems. Conversations with Plants is an invitation to step into your own relationship with plants - their stories and meanings - feel into their medicine, and then understand how to work with them by bringing your own medicine into the conversation. Being an herbalist is not about prescribing, it's about reconnecting with the herbs and their consciousness and holding a discussion with them and the people for whom you are asking their help, nourishment, nurturing, support, protection, and healing along with their wisdom and ability to remind us who we are. This book is about bringing herbs back into your daily life and remembering the direct intimate relationship that has always existed between people and plants. There are plenty of books that provide information on preparations and dosages, but Conversations with Plants shows you how to relate to the green community and use specific plants in your daily food and medicine preparation, explaining the meaning and process behind it, so you can work out appropriate doses and preparations by using common sense.

In some parts of the world, plant medicine is still taught at the kitchen table, by the cooking fire, or in the fields, passed down from parent to child and woven through the fabric of the culture. In many places it has been severely eroded, but it has not been lost. This book helps us reclaim and restore a hugely important part of our heritage: our plant medicine path. Conversations with Plants reminds us of the intimate bond that has always existed between people and plants and encourages us to bring them back into our daily lives. It includes instructions on how to develop these connections by using essential oils, gardening and growing herbs, medicine making and gathering wild food. It is an invitation to step into your own relationship with plants - their stories and meanings - feel into their medicine and understand how to work with them by bringing your own medicine into the conversation. It is for practitioners, students, and anyone wishing to deepen their knowledge of the green world.

The universe speaks in many ways if we develop the ability to hear its voice. Michael Roads brings this message in his account of seven months in Australia where he was led step-by-step to a final wisdom that is remarkable in its simplicity and in its message of hope for all humanity.

"Once in a while you find a book that stuns you. Its scope leaves you breathless. This is such a book." — John White, San Francisco Chronicle Explore the inner world of plants and its fascinating relation to mankind, as uncovered by the latest discoveries of science. In this truly revolutionary and beloved work, drawn from remarkable research, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird cast light on the rich psychic universe of plants. The Secret Life of Plants explores plants' response to human care and nurturing, their ability to communicate with man, plants' surprising reaction to music, their lie-detection abilities, their creative powers, and much more. Tompkins and Bird's classic book affirms the depth of humanity's relationship with nature and adds special urgency to the cause of protecting the environment that nourishes us.

A research scientist’s fascinating study of plant communication reveals how we “have been misunderstanding plants, and ourselves, for all of history” (The Paris Review). “A compelling story of discovery . . . [that] will change the way you see the world”—for fans of The Hidden Life of Trees (Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of Braiding Sweetgrass) In this “phytobiography”—a collection of stories written in partnership with a plant—research scientist Monica Gagliano shares genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. By transcending the view of plants as the objects of scientific materialism, Gagliano encourages us to rethink plants as people—beings with subjectivity, consciousness, and volition, and hence having the capacity for their own perspectives and voices. The book draws on up-close-and-personal encounters with the plants themselves, as well as plant shamans, indigenous elders, and mystics from around the world and integrates these experiences with an incredible research journey and the groundbreaking scientific discoveries that emerged from it. Gagliano has published numerous peer-reviewed scientific papers on how plants have a Pavlov-like response to stimuli and can learn, remember, and communicate to neighboring plants. She has pioneered the brand-new research field of plant bioacoustics, for the first time experimentally demonstrating that plants emit their own 'voices' and, moreover, detect and respond to the sounds of their environments. By demonstrating experimentally that learning is not the exclusive province of animals, Gagliano has re-ignited the discourse on plant subjectivity and ethical and legal standing. This is the story of how she made those discoveries and how the plants helped her along the way.

Explores the secret lives of various plants, from the colors they see to whether or not they really like classical music to their ability to sense nearby danger.

“An empowering and expertly curated look at the horticultural world.” —Gardens Illustrated In this beautiful and empowering book, Jennifer Jewell introduces 75 inspiring women. Working in wide-reaching fields that include botany, floral design, landscape architecture, farming, herbalism, and food justice, these influencers are creating change from the ground up. Profiled women include flower farmer Erin Benzakein; codirector of Soul Fire Farm Leah Penniman; plantswoman Flora Grubb; edible and cultural landscape designer Leslie Bennett; Caribbean-American writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid; soil scientist Elaine Ingham; landscape designer Ariella Chezar; floral designer Amy Merrick, and many more. Rich with personal stories and insights, Jewell’s portraits reveal a devotion that transcends age, locale, and background, reminding us of the profound role of green growing things in our world—and our lives.

From Homer to Helen Keller, from Dune to Stevie Wonder, from the invention of braille to the science of echolocation, M. Leona Godin explores the fascinating history of blindness, interweaving it with her own story of gradually losing her sight. “[A] thought-provoking mixture of criticism, memoir, and advocacy." —The New Yorker There Plant Eyes probes the ways in which blindness has shaped our ocularcentric culture, challenging deeply ingrained ideas about what it means to be “blind.” For millennia, blindness has been used to signify such things as thoughtlessness (“blind faith”), irrationality (“blind rage”), and unconsciousness (“blind evolution”). But at the same time, blind people have been othered as the recipients of special powers as compensation for lost sight (from the poetic gifts of John Milton to the heightened senses of the comic book hero Daredevil). Godin—who began losing her vision at age ten—illuminates the often-surprising history of both the condition of blindness and the myths and ideas that have grown up around it over the course of generations. She combines an analysis of blindness in art and culture (from King Lear to Star Wars) with a study of the science of blindness and key developments in accessibility (the white cane, embossed printing, digital technology) to paint a vivid personal and cultural history. A genre-defying work, There Plant Eyes reveals just how essential blindness and vision are to humanity’s understanding of itself and the world.

The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World is an interdisciplinary collection of essays in the emerging field of Plant Studies. The volume is the first of its kind to bring together a dynamic body of scholarship that shares a critique of long-standing human perceptions of plants as lacking autonomy, agency, consciousness, and, intelligence. The leading metaphor of the book—“the green thread”, echoing poet Dylan Thomas’ phrase “the green fuse”—carries multiple meanings. On a more apparent level, “the green thread” is what weaves together the diverse approaches of this collection: an interest in the vegetal that goes beyond single disciplines and specialist discourses, and one that not only encourages but necessitates interdisciplinary and even interspecies dialogue. On another level, “the green thread” links creative and historical productions to the materiality of the vegetal—a reality reflecting our symbiosis with oxygen-producing beings. In short, The Green Thread refers to the conversations about plants that transcend strict disciplinary boundaries as well as to the possibility of dialogue with plants.