There once was a Philosopher-Botanist who, on his jobs, had been an optimist. But he bred seedless fruits, and came to feel in cahoots with purpose-denying nihilist dogmatists.
Conflicted Botanist Limerick
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Tag Archives: Botany
BOOK REVIEW: A Gardener’s Guide to Botany by Scott Zona
A Gardener’s Guide to Botany: The biology behind the plants you love, how they grow, and what they need by Scott ZonaMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Release Date: December 6, 2022
This beginner’s guide to botany is well conceived and executed. The photographs are beautiful and well-chosen to help the reader understand the complexities discussed in the text. The text gets definitionally dense in places, but also presents fascinating ideas in plain English. I learned a lot from the book, particularly where it was less steeped in technical terminology and details and offered intriguing ideas and examples.
While the book’s eight chapters aren’t formally divvied up, I would place them into three groups. Chapters one and two are about what plants are and how they are organized to do what they do. Chapters three through five are about what plants need to survive (water, light, and nutrients, respectively) and why. The last three chapters explore the main activities plants engage in (i.e. defense, reproduction, and seed dispersal.)
I found this book to be informative and readable, and if you’re looking for a basic guide to botany that skillfully employs photographs, I’d have a look at this one.
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BOOK REVIEW: Plant Science for Gardeners by Robert Pavlis
Plant Science for Gardeners: Essentials for Growing Better Plants by Robert PavlisMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
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Out: June 7, 2022
This book provides a basic overview of botany for gardeners. It’s written in a way that’s readable to a science neophyte, and both uses garden-relevant examples as well as considers biological concepts primarily as is germane to the ornamental plants and vegetables gardeners tend to cultivate.
The big takeaway for me was that gardeners are being sold bogus technologies and techniques that seem intuitively sound if one doesn’t have the requisite understanding of science to see where the fallacies lie. Throughout the book, there are sections that refute common botany myths. To give some examples, there’s the idea of painting over cut limbs that can trap water and contribute to rot, and there are soil treatments that are superfluous.
There were a couple of points at which I had to re-read to make sense of what was being said, not because it was complicated but because of issues like explanations that didn’t include all the information necessary for clarity or statements being made in such a way as to mislead the mind a bit. The two cases that spring to mind dealt in physics more than biology, so I couldn’t say whether this just reflects my limited understanding of botany – relative to that of physics. At any rate, I don’t believe any wrong information was given. There were just a couple instances where information was presented in a way that could be confusing, but – for the most part – the explanations were clear and seemed consistent with my understanding of the subject.
If you want to enhance your understanding of botany and some of the myths that lead to poor practices in the garden, you may want to look into this book.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Botany of Beer by Giuseppe Caruso
The Botany of Beer: An Illustrated Guide to More Than 500 Plants Used in Brewing by Giuseppe CarusoMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
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Out: July 26, 2022
This is an excellent reference for those with a serious interest in beer, botany, or both of the above. For the amateur brewer, it offers insight into some new and exotic ingredients for experimental brews. For the amateur botanist, it offers greater understanding of how plants are used by mankind — in one prominent domain, at least. For the beer connoisseur, it provides examples of some brews with unusual ingredients that might just expand one’s palate. The book is well-organized, easy-to-use, and has some fine ancillary features to make it an even more valuable tool.
For each of the 500-ish plants, there’s an orderly entry. Entries are arranged alphabetically by scientific name, and the book also provides alternate names, as well as common names and variations. There are drawings that break parts of the plant out for better identification, and there are sections offering both physical and chemical textual descriptions of each plant. There are also sections listing related species and cultivars (cultivated variants.) There is a geographic section that describes, if known, the place of origin of the plant, as well as the domain the plant has expanded to, or in which it’s now cultivated. One section describes what parts of the plant are used in beermaking, another provides a list of the styles of beers the plant has been (or might be) used in, and another (where applicable) an example of a beer in which that ingredient is found. As applicable, there’s also information about plant toxicity and – in some cases – fun facts related to the plant’s use in brewing. There’s a glossary, bibliography, and common name index, as well.
I’d put the included plants into three categories: 1.) plants that are common cultivated foods somewhere on the planet (note: that doesn’t mean they will appear in grocery stores in your particular neck-of-the-woods;) 2.) trees whose wood is used in barrel-making or smoking, but aren’t ingredients, per se; and 3.) ingredients that aren’t likely to appear on your plate unless you’re a hardcore forager or a deep-dive foodie with connections to a botanist or native population.
I found this book to be a well-crafted guide to beer-relevant plants, and would recommend readers interested in beer (or – more broadly – food and beverage ingredients) give it a look.
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BOOK REVIEW: The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart
The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks by Amy Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is about how plants are used in the making of alcoholic beverages from vegetative matter that serves as the primary ingredient in fermentation to obscure herbs and berries used to lend subtle flavoring. The book covers a lot of ground, being at once a guide to the chemistry of fermentation and distillation, a mixologist’s recipe book, and a guide to growing the plants used to make booze.
I will admit, if I weren’t such a neophyte to both subjects at hand – botany and alcoholic beverages – I probably wouldn’t have rated this book so highly. For me, almost every page offered new fun facts about alcoholic beverages, some of which I’ve consumed and many of which I never have. So if you have a high degree of understanding about one or both of these subjects, you may not find the book as intensely satisfying. Also, at times the book comes off a bit pretentiously – hardcore drunks probably don’t want to be shackled with so many rules for optimal alcoholic consumption (e.g. what type of glass they should drink a given drink from, etc.), but hardcore drunks are probably not a huge readership demographic. (It should also be noted that the reader gets some knowledge to fight pretentiousness as well, such as against gin drinkers who say they would never drink vodka when, in fact, they are drinking juniper berry-flavored vodka.)
The book consists of three parts. The first part describes fermentation and distillation and then offers two sub-parts dealing with the most everyday bases for alcoholic drinks (e.g. corn, grapes, potato, and wheat) as well as some of the more obscure and unusual objects of fermentation, respectively.
The second part delves into the plants that are added for flavoring or the like, and these are organized by: 1.) herbs and spices, 2.) flowers, 3.) trees, 4.) fruit, and 5.) nuts and seeds.
The final part gives some guidance on how some of these plants can be grown. It should be noted that this section is a bit thinner because a lot of information on growing the plants is covered in side-bars in the earlier sections and also this isn’t the book’s main thrust. The third part is similarly divided up between herbs, flowers, trees, berries & vines, and fruits & vegetables.
There are quite a few graphics, mostly in the form of line drawings, throughout the book – some are purely aesthetic and others are informative (e.g. drawings of plants.) There is also a recommended reading section that proposes further books to expand one’s understanding at the nexus of booze and plants. The book presents a lot of material in text boxes that set the information aside. These boxes include recipes, but also insights into how to best grow these plants with particularly emphasis given to how the process is optimized for those growing for beverage production (e.g. sometimes the optimal variety isn’t the most common variety.)
I enjoyed this book. It was readable, full of fun bits of information, and written in a light-hearted style. If you’re looking for a book on plants and alcoholic beverages, this is a good starting point. It doesn’t get too deep in the weeds but yet offers some obscure but amusing factoids.
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BOOK REVIEW: Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is in part the autobiography of a female scientist with a career in a field that is both male-dominated and in which basic science is the meat and potatoes—by which I mean a discipline with few of the commercial applications at which companies, foundations, venture capitalists, and governments are willing to throw millions. Interspersed into the autobiographical chapters are short essays on trees and the ways they survive, grow, and interact with each other and their environments. So it’s a mix of biography and pop science, and was one of the most well-received science-themed books of last year (2016.)
The book is arranged into three parts. The first 11 chapters are entitled “Roots & Leaves” and these cover Jahren’s path to becoming a scientist from her childhood in an unexpressive Scandinavian family in rural Minnesota, through her college job in a hospital lab, and onto her graduate education. Part II consists of 12 chapters that cover Jahren’s years as a junior faculty member, most of which takes place at (my alma mater and former employer) Georgia Tech. The title of this chapter, “Wood & Knots,” gives one some indication of where the author’s story sits in this part of her life. She experiences both growth and set-backs during her time in Atlanta. The last part, “Flowers & Fruit,” describes the period in which not only her professional life, but also her personal life begins to bear fruit. During these years she moved her lab to Johns Hopkins, got tenure, built a family, and eventually moved to Hawaii to work for the University of Hawaii.
Besides Jahren, the only other major character in the book is her side-kick Bill, who was an undergraduate where she did her doctorate in California. The two met when Jahren was the Teaching Assistant for a course that Bill took, and subsequently he followed her from lab to lab as her research assistant. Bill’s mix of workaholic diligence, nerdiness, dysfunction, and adroit sarcasm made him a sort of soulmate of science. Their strange, platonic relationship is at the heart of the book, and is in part what keeps the reader wondering and turning pages. Her dog, her husband, and her child are all secondary characters by comparison (perhaps not in her life but in the science-centric story she is telling) though her son becomes a central player near the book’s end. The other people are cameos by grad students and other faculty members.
Jahren’s use of language is skillful and at times poetically beautiful. There’s a great deal of humor in the book, much of which stems from the dialogue between her and Bill. While the parts of the books about trees didn’t wow me as much as Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees,” that may be because I read his book first and, therefore, was clued into some of the fascinating arboreal secrets. That said, these botanical sketches are intriguing and readable. The only place that the book bogged down for me was in incessant complaints about the difficulty of keeping a lab funded. (And this is from a person who was paid from grant money—job perpetually at risk–at the same Institute where Jahren struggled. But now I’ve lived in India for the past four years so… first world problems, right?)
I’d recommend this book for readers generally. I think it may be particularly insightful for young women choosing a career in science, but the book shouldn’t be shunted into a parochial box. There are a number of elements that will keep one reading. For some it will be a fascination with the unexpectedly complex life of trees. For some, the tension of this life story may have a lot to do with the mental health issues that Jahren struggles with. These issues aren’t put front and center in the book, but there are points at which their impact is felt. A few will just be wondering what exactly is going on with her relationship with Bill.
the !n(tro)verted yogi 