A Garden of Marvels

图书信息

作者	Kassinger, Ruth
出版社	William Morrow
ISBN	9780062049032
出版时间	2014-02-01
字数	52.0万
分类	William Morrow,进口书,外文原版书,小说

读书简介

A witty and engaging history of the first botanists, interwoven with stories of today's extraordinary plants found in the garden and the labIn Paradise Under Glass, Ruth Kassinger recounts with grace and humor her journey from brown thumb to green, sharing the lessons that she learned from building a home conservatory in the wake of a devastating personal crisis. In A Garden of Marvels, she extends the story. "This book was born of a murder, a murder I committed," she begins. The victim was a kumquat tree. Though she diligently did her best watering, fertilizing, repotting, and pruning the plant turned brown and brittle. Why did the kumquat die when other plants in the garden that received the same attention thrivedshe wondered. It was an experience that offered invaluable insight. While she knew the basic rules of caring for indoor plants, Kassinger realized that she understood very little about plant physiology how roots, stems, leaves, and flowers actually function. Determined not to repeat her failure, she set out to learn the fundamentals of botany in order to become a better gardener. A Garden of Marvels is the story of her wise and enchanting odyssey to discover the secret life of plants. Kassinger retraces the progress of the first botanists including a melancholy Italian anatomist, a renegade French surgeon, a stuttering English minister, an obsessive German schoolteacher, and Charles Darwin who banished myths and misunderstandings and discovered that flowers have sex, leaves eat air, roots choose their food, and hormones make morning glories climb fence posts. She goes out into the world as well, visiting modern gardens, farms, and labs to discover the science behind extraordinary plants like one-ton pumpkins, truly black petunias, ferns that eat the arsenic in contaminated soil, biofuel grass that grows twelve feet tall, and the world's only photosynthesizing animal. Kassinger also introduces us to modern scientific research that offers hope for combatting climate change and alleviating world hunger. She then transfers her insights to her own garden, where she nurtures a "cocktail" tree that bears five kinds of fruit, cures an ailing Buddha's Hand plant with beneficial fungi, and gets a tree to text her when it's thirsty. Intertwining personal anecdotes, accessible science, and little-known history, A Garden of Marvels takes us on an eye-opening journey into Kassinger's garden and yours offering us a new appreciation of this exquisite gift of nature: "Our garden is more than a marvel. It's as close to a miracle as there is on Earth."

目录

Dedication

Contents

Introduction

Part I: Inside a Plant

one - Cocktail, Anyone?

two - The Birth and Long Life of the Vegetable Lamb

three - Through a Glass, However Darkly

four - The Persecuted Professor

five - Inside a Plant

Part II: Roots

six - Restless Roots

seven - The Enormous Gourd

eight - The Way of All Water

nine - How to Kill a Hickory

ten - Our Fine Fungal Friends

eleven - Arsenic and Young Fronds

twelve - The Once and Future Wheat

thirteen - Off to the Races

Part III: Leaves

fourteen - New Beginnings

fifteen - A Momentous Mint

sixteen - Leaves Eat Air

seventeen - The Vegetable Slug

eighteen - Once in a Blue-Green Moon

nineteen - The Tenacity of Trees

twenty - Amazing Grass

Part IV: Flowers

twenty-one - Sex in the Garden

twenty-two - Who Needs Romeo?

twenty-three - Black Petunias

twenty-four - The Abominable Mystery

twenty-five - Cheap Sex

twenty-six - Scent and Sex

Part V: Onward, Upward, and Afterward

twenty-seven - Trouble in Paradise

twenty-eight - Onward and Upward

twenty-nine - Afterward

Excerpt from Paradise Under Glass

one

Acknowledgments

Notes and Sources

Bibliography

Index

Books by Ruth Kassinger

Copyright

About the Publisher