Strange Bright Blooms
Strange Bright Blooms

Author: Randy Malamud

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2021-09-27

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1789144213

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Virginia Woolf famously began one of her greatest novels: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” Of course she would: why would anyone surrender the best part of the day to someone else? Flowers grace our lives at moments of celebration and despair. “We eat, drink, sing, dance, and flirt with them,” writes Kakuzo Okakura. Flowers brighten our homes, our parties, and our rituals with incomparable notes of natural beauty, but the “nature” in these displays is tamed and conscribed. Randy Malamud seeks to understand the transplanted nature of cut flowers—of our relationship with them and the careful curation of their very existence. It is a picaresque, unpredictable ramble through the world of flowers, but also the world itself, exploring painting, murals, fashion, public art, glass flowers, pressed flowers, flowery church hats, weaponized flowers, deconstructed flowers, flower power, and much more.

Flowers Are Pretty ... Weird!
Flowers Are Pretty ... Weird!

Author: Rosemary Mosco

Publisher: Tundra Books

Published: 2022-04-26

Total Pages: 37

ISBN-13: 0735265941

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Warning -- this book contains top-secret information about flowers! Prepare to be shocked and weirded out by this hilarious and totally true picture book introduction to some of nature's strangest plants. Flowers are beautiful. They have bright colors, soft petals and sweet nectar. Yum! But that's not the whole truth. Flowers can be WEIRD . . . and one bee is here to let everyone know! Talking directly to the reader, a bee reveals how flowers are so much stranger than what we think. Did you know that there are some flowers that only bloom in the nighttime? Some flowers are spooky, and look like ghosts, or bats, or a monster's mouth. And while most flowers smell good, there are some that smell like dead meat, or even horse poop! This hilarious and refreshing book with silly and sweet illustrations explores the science of flowers and shows that these plants are not always stereotypically pretty and harmless as we often think they are -- they are fascinating, disgusting, complicated and amazing.

Botanical Architecture
Botanical Architecture

Author: Paul Dobraszczyk

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2024-11-12

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 1789149649

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An original call to reorient architecture around our relationship to plants. When we look at trees, we see a form of natural architecture, and yet we have seemingly always exploited trees to make new buildings of our own. Whereas a tree creates its own structure, humans generally destroy other things to build, with increasingly disastrous consequences. In Botanical Architecture, Paul Dobraszczyk looks closely at how elements of plants—seeds, roots, trunks, branches, leaves, flowers, and canopies—compare with and constitute human-made buildings. Given the omnipresence of plant life in and around our structures, Dobraszczyk argues that we ought to build as much for plants as for ourselves, understanding that our lives are always totally dependent on theirs. Botanical Architecture offers a provocative and original take on the relationship between ecology and architecture.

What Blooms from Dust
What Blooms from Dust

Author: James Markert

Publisher: HarperChristian + ORM

Published: 2018-06-26

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0785217428

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"The closer he got, the brighter that red became. It was a rose—a rose that had no earthly business growing there, right in the middle of all that dust." Just as Jeremiah Goodbye is set to meet his fate in the electric chair, he is given a second chance at life. With the flip of a coin, he decides to return to his home town of Nowhere, Oklahoma, to settle the score with his twin brother Josiah. But upon his escape, he enters a world he doesn’t recognize—one that has been overtaken by the Dust Bowl. And the gift he once relied on to guide him is as unrecognizable as the path back to Nowhere. On his journey home, he accidentally rescues a young boy, and the pair arrive at their destination where they are greeted by darkened skies and fearful townspeople who have finally begun to let the past few years of hardship bury them under the weight of all that dust. Unlikely heroes, Jeremiah and his new companion, Peter Cotton, try to protect the residents of Nowhere from themselves, but Jeremiah must face his nightmares and free himself from the guilt of his past and the secrets that destroyed his family. Filled with mystery and magic, this exquisite novel from award-winning author James Markert is a story of finding hope in the midst of darkness and discovering the beauty of unexpected kindness.

The Well at the World's End
The Well at the World's End

Author: A. J. Mackinnon

Publisher: Skyhorse

Published: 2016-01-26

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 151070213X

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“A great travel writer and more importantly a great traveler.” —Sydney Morning Herald When A. J. Mackinnon quits his job in Australia, he knows only that he longs to travel to the well at the world’s end, a mysterious pool on a remote Scottish island whose waters, legend has it, hold the secret to eternal youth. Determined not to fly—he claims it would feel as though he were cheating—he sets out with a backpack, some fireworks, and a map of the world and trusts that chance will take care of the rest. Traveling by land and sea, train, truck, horse, and yacht, Mackinnon travels across the world, getting caught up in a series of hilarious, sometimes surreal, adventures. He survives a near-fatal bus crash in Australia, accidentally marries a Laotian princess, is attacked by a Komodo dragon, and does time in a sketchy Chinese jail, among many other mishaps and misadventures along the way. Each new continent and each new mode of transport brings the possibility of a near-miss or happy accident, all on the quest for eternal youth. This is the astonishing true story of a remarkable voyage.