The Big, Bad, Book of Botany: The World's Most Fascinating Flora

In a quirky, alphabetical collection of folklore, traditional botany, growing suggestions, and modern science and nutrition, Largo (The Big Bad Book of Beasts) shares delight in the weird and wonderful corners of the plant world. Reading like Culpepper's Herbal filtered through Ripley's Believe it Or Not, each plant gets a colorful tagline (castor oil bush is "Nature's Night Light" while nettle is "The Little Warrior") and an illustration lovingly hand drawn by a member of Miami's Tropical Botanic Artists Collective. Common edibles like kiwi and oregano and garden plants like bleeding heart and rose sit alongside both well-known strange plants like corpse flower and more obscure exotics like the West African ordeal poison calabar bean. Similarly, ancient uses like that of hops in beer share space with modern benefits like the efficacy of licorice root as an antiviral. Largo's palpable enthusiasm for the ways in which humans and plants interact means every page yields something to catch the reader's interest. B&w illus. (Aug.)