Conversations with Plants

Author: Nikki Darrell
Publisher: Aeon Books
ISBN: 9781911597643
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
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.

Conversations with Plants

Author: Nikki Darrell
Publisher: Aeon Books
ISBN: 1912807432
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
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.

Talking with Nature

Author: Michael J. Roads
Publisher: Hj Kramer
ISBN: 9780915811069
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 158

Book Description
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.

The Secret Life of Plants

Author: Peter Tompkins
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006287442X
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
"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.

Thus Spoke the Plant

Author: Monica Gagliano
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1623172438
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
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.

The Earth in Her Hands

Author: Jennifer Jewell
Publisher: Timber Press
ISBN: 1604699027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Book Description
“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.

Good Morning, Beautiful Business

Author: Judy Wicks
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
ISBN: 1603584994
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
It's not often that someone stumbles into entrepreneurship and ends up reviving a community and starting a national economic-reform movement. But that's what happened when, in 1983, Judy Wicks founded the White Dog Café on the first floor of her house on a row of Victorian brownstones in West Philadelphia. After helping to save her block from demolition, Judy grew what began as a tiny muffin shop into a 200-seat restaurant-one of the first to feature local, organic, and humane food. The restaurant blossomed into a regional hub for community, and a national powerhouse for modeling socially responsible business. Good Morning, Beautiful Business is a memoir about the evolution of an entrepreneur who would not only change her neighborhood, but would also change her world-helping communities far and wide create local living economies that value people and place as much as commerce and that make communities not just interesting and diverse and prosperous, but also resilient. Wicks recounts a girlhood coming of age in the sixties, a stint working in an Alaska Eskimo village in the seventies, her experience cofounding the first Free People store, her accidental entry into the world of restauranteering, the emergence of the celebrated White Dog Café, and her eventual role as an international leader and speaker in the local-living-economies movement. Her memoir traces the roots of her career - exploring what it takes to marry social change and commerce, and do business differently. Passionate, fun, and inspirational, Good Morning, Beautiful Business explores the way women, and men, can follow both mind and heart, do what's right, and do well by doing good.

The Green Thread

Author: Patrícia Vieira
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498510604
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 327

Book Description
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.

Plant Spirit Healing

Author: Pam Montgomery
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1591439957
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 214

Book Description
A hands-on approach to working with the healing powers of plant spirits • Explores the scientific basis underlying the practices of indigenous healers and shamans • Illuminates the matrix where plant intelligence and human intelligence join • Reveals that partnering with plants is an evolutionary imperative Indigenous healers and shamans have known since antiquity that plants possess a spirit essence that can communicate through light, sound, and vibration. Now scientific studies are verifying this understanding. Plant Spirit Healing reveals the power of plant spirits to join with human intelligence to bring about profound healing. These spirits take us beyond mere symptomatic treatment to aligning us with the vast web of nature. Plants are more than their chemical constituents. They are intelligent beings that have the capacity to raise consciousness to a level where true healing can take place. In this book, herbalist Pam Montgomery offers an understanding of the origins of disease and the therapeutic use of plant spirits to bring balance and healing. She offers a process engaging heart, soul, and spirit that she calls the triple spiral path. In our modern existence, we are increasingly challenged with broken hearts, souls in exile, and malnourished spirits. By working through the heart, we connect with the soul and gain access to spirit. She explains that the evolution of plants has always preceded their animal counterparts and that plant spirits offer a guide to our spiritual evolution--a stage of growth imperative not only for the healing of humans but also the healing of the earth.

The Language of Plants

Author: Monica Gagliano
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452954127
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
The eighteenth-century naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles) argued that plants are animate, living beings and attributed them sensation, movement, and a certain degree of mental activity, emphasizing the continuity between humankind and plant existence. Two centuries later, the understanding of plants as active and communicative organisms has reemerged in such diverse fields as plant neurobiology, philosophical posthumanism, and ecocriticism. The Language of Plants brings together groundbreaking essays from across the disciplines to foster a dialogue between the biological sciences and the humanities and to reconsider our relation to the vegetal world in new ethical and political terms. Viewing plants as sophisticated information-processing organisms with complex communication strategies (they can sense and respond to environmental cues and play an active role in their own survival and reproduction through chemical languages) radically transforms our notion of plants as unresponsive beings, ready to be instrumentally appropriated. By providing multifaceted understandings of plants, informed by the latest developments in evolutionary ecology, the philosophy of biology, and ecocritical theory, The Language of Plants promotes the freedom of imagination necessary for a new ecological awareness and more sustainable interactions with diverse life forms. Contributors: Joni Adamson, Arizona State U; Nancy E. Baker, Sarah Lawrence College; Karen L. F. Houle, U of Guelph; Luce Irigaray, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris; Erin James, U of Idaho; Richard Karban, U of California at Davis; André Kessler, Cornell U; Isabel Kranz, U of Vienna; Michael Marder, U of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU); Timothy Morton, Rice U; Christian Nansen, U of California at Davis; Robert A. Raguso, Cornell U; Catriona Sandilands, York U.