Dangerous Garden: The Quest for Plants to Change Our Lives
Perilous Garden: The Quest for Plants to Exchange Our Lives Books
Product Description
As our earliest ancestors migrated out of Africa, they encountered entirely new floras. By sampling these, they found plants that appeared to (and sometimes did) heal wounds, cure maladies, and ease troubled minds. This administer of discovery continues today, as multinational pharmaceutical companies bioprospect in the globe’s remaining wild places for the next tamoxifen or digitalis.
The gardener and botanist David Stuart tells the fascinating tale of botanical medicine, revealing more than soothing balms and heroic cures. Most of the truly powerful and effective medicinal plants are double-edged, with a dark side to balance the light. They can heal or kill, cool or enslave, lift depression or summon our gods and monsters. Often the difference between these polar effects is a simple exchange in dosage.
Stuart chronicles the tale of how the herbal materia medica of healing and killing plants has sparked wars, helped establish intercontinental trade routes, and seeded fortunes. As plant species traveled the globe, their medicinal uses evolved over miles and through centuries. Plants once believed to be cure-alls are now considered too perilous for use. Others, once so valuable that they sowed the wealth of empires, are merely spices on the kitchen shelf.
David Stuart recounts engrossing human tales too, not only of the scientists, explorers, and doctors who gathered, named, and prescribed these plants but also the shamans, magicians, and quacks who claimed to possess the ultimate herbal aphrodisiac or elixir.
(20040704)
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This book is a excellent introduction to the complex history of humans and plants. Indeed, this is such an essential relationship, extending from basic foodstuffs and clothing to biofuels, narcotics and medicines, that one may possibly argue this relationship has defined us as a species. The author reveals many plants that I’d never heard of as being candidates for either further research or potential as new snakeoils for a society willing to judge nature hides the next “key bullet” hostile to what ails us. The fascination of people with sex, immortality, intoxication and beauty will continue to compel mankind to seek succor and solace in the chlorophyll kingdom. The marriage can never be kaput, to be sure, but a lack of understanding of what plants can realy deliver will often result in people’s disillusionment with the initial promise of paradise. Small wonder that Genesis used a fruit as the symbol of man’s hopes and dashed dreams.
Rating: 5 / 5
I absolutely loved this book! Not only was it fascinating and compelling reading but the book was full of incredibly obscure but very enlightening in rank about the usage history of the plants covered. Mr. Stuart also gave (in the majority of instances) the specific botanical names of the plants and other correlated species which is rare in non-scientific “History of Plants” books. The selection of illustrations was absolutely superb.
The only negative that I have about this book is that Mr. Stuart frequently listed vague references to scientific “studies” that proved his points about certain plants but there was no in rank, footnoted or otherwise, to definitively identitify these “studies”. He also had a few scattered references to plants mentioned in unspecified publications. Who did these studies and who printed these tales? In a book of this nature, I guess to have facts and sources laid out a bit more painstakingly.
I still gave this book FIVE STARS because it was so much fun to read. I have lots of other books with which to thwart reference and authenticate some of the more vague references so I wasn’t particularly distressed by the oversight although, in my view, if you are going to painstakingly research and document some things, then you should painstakingly research and document everything.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Rating: 5 / 5
“Perilous Garden” is an EXCELLENT book on the history of plants and how humans interact with plants, a topic that I stumbled onto only about a link of years ago. The book is kaput up into eight chapters that cover about 200 pages. There are lots of pictures and color plates, so each chapter is nearly a stand-lonely section that is just the aptly part to be read over an afternoon or spread out over a link of nights at bedtime.
Each chapter covers a category of use or effect that humans have tried to get out of plants. The chapters are:
– The Fantastic Afflictions, covering plants plotting to affect diseases such as bubonic plague, malaria and leprosy.
– The Vital Organs, covering plants plotting to affect vital organs such as the heart, stomach, etc.
– The Flight from Pain, or the search for pain-relievers, with an extensive section on opium.
– Chasing Venus, which is kind of self-explanatory.
– The Killing Plants, very self-explanatory.
– The Seven Ages of Man, meaning plants that are supposed to prolong life, maintain a youthful appearance, or otherwise slow the passage of time.
– The Mind, or plants that affect the mind and have been both revered and demonized because of it, including marijuana, cocaine, tobacco and qat.
– The Mysteries of the Gods, which covers plants used in religious and shamanic ceremonies, such as peyote.
The book is certainly not a lightweight and people looking for serious in rank will find a lot of worth. Plants are referred to both by their common name and their scientific names and the index covers both types of terms as well. The Bibliography includes books from 1516 to the 1990s, and the Author’s Acknowledgments on the last page list a number of excellent websites as well.
Stuart discusses the historical uses of various plants and how some plants have gone from being cure-alls in the past to being either banned or sold in the grocery-store spice aisle now. He spends a lot of time on the concept of Janus plants, which are “two-faced” plants, meaning they can both harm and heal, and he also discusses fads in medicine, including a long period of time in the middle ages where if a plant had a visible effect it was plotting to be better than one that didn’t have a visible effect, so plants that made people sweaty, agitated, nauseous, sleepy, etc. were prescribed in amounts that are horrifying by today’s standards.
Some authors talk down to readers, but this author absolutely does not and will jump from discussion of which 19th-century herbal contained which plant to discussion of the exact chemical names of the active alkaloids in a plant, if they are unknown than which other known alkaloids do they resemble, and what current research is being done and current uses and/or speculation.
There are also numerous small facts dotted here and there throughout the book which the author clearly can’t spend much time on because of space but which are equally fascinating in themselves, such as:
– (pg 188) Morning glory has LSD-like components that have been much studied and have variable effects in mice, rabbits and humans, with some people feeling small effect and other getting a full “trip”, although often an unpleasant one.
– (pgs 7-8) Rhubarb was once plotting to be an aphrodisiac by the Romans and a cure for a form of malaria by medieval herbalists; until the mid-1500s it was only available to Europe as imported dried roots.
– (pgs 69-70) There was once a fantastic sickbay atop Soutra Hill in Scotland, south of Edinburgh, its first charter dated from 1108 (!) and it reached its epogee in 1462 and was finally closed in the 1500s, razed by the late 1800s and its drains, cesspits and middens started to be excavated in the 1980s.
I may possibly go on for pages more, but I will digress. In small, if you like history and if you like plants, you’ll probably like this book.
Rating: 5 / 5