Book Reviews
The Big, Bad Book of Botany by Michael Largo
William Morrow & Company, 8/2014
The good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. The author provides a fascinating summary of a wide diversity of some of the most famous and important plants grown around the world. Largo introduces the reader to their uses as food, drink, medicines, poisons, narcotics, and romantic bouquets. He reveals where each species was originally found, and how, where, and why they were introduced to other countries over the centuries. The vegetative and floral characteristics of each plant group is described and information is provided on cultivation and in what conditions each plant grows best.
I also enjoyed the diversity of botanical illustrations provided by artists in the Miami botanical art group. The images showcased characteristic aspects of each plant’s vegetative and floral morphology.
Dr. F.G. (Eric) Hochberg, Curator Emeritus
Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
Co-Founder of the Nature Printing Society
The Big, Bad Book of Botany
Review from the Wall Street Journal
Bookshelf The Grass Menagerie By Alexandra Mullen Updated Aug. 9, 2014 11:30 a.m. ET
When I was a kid, the plant world was a narrow and unlovely terrain enclosing only weeding (yuck) or soppy love poems (double yuck). But if "The Big, Bad Book of Botany" had come my way, I would have giggled and goggled at its showy display of wacky plant lore. Some Japanese Buddhist monks, it seems, applied the sap of Taxicodendron vernicifluum as a lacquer to their skin so they could mummify themselves while still alive. Those exotically beautiful bird of paradise flowers were given their Latin name, Strelitzia , by Joseph Banks in honor of George III's wife Charlotte, the Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. And the word "celery" derives from the Mycenaean.
Michael Largo, moving on from the fauna inhabiting his "Big, Bad Book of Beasts" (2013), has also crammed in snippets of more practical information about plant cultivation, propagation, structure and the many uses to which plants can be put, from food and folk medicine to psychotropic drugs and protease inhibitors. Did you know that agave shows up in Mayan and Aztec fossilized human feces? Oh, and hallucinogenic flowers are found in Neanderthal graves, bamboo is a grass that sometimes blooms only every 65 or 120 years, and mushrooms are not plants. Culture in the larger sense gets the occasional look-in, from literature (rhododendrons in Joyce's "Ulysses"), painting ( van Gogh's sunflowers, naturally) and music ("The Return of the Giant Hogweed" by Genesis).
Mr. Largo's admiration for plants leads him to make some moral pronouncements: Elms "shouldn't be cut down or killed by anyone," he writes. Evolutionary adaptations so amaze him that even though he knows "plants have no brains," he can't resist speculating about their intelligence. After all, "there are countless . . . techniques plants employ that even the smartest computer could not match." Giant water lilies (Victoria amazonica), which change color and sex overnight in their reproductive process, are "clever," skunk cabbages "smarter than we think," and acacias made "a smart evolutionary move" to use ants for pollination. Redwoods, a species dating back at least to the Jurassic that have flourished in different parts of the world as climate has changed, inspire him to wonder, "Could this impulse for life be attributed to an unfathomable type of consciousness among plants?"
These examples should make it clear that "The Big, Bad Book of Botany" is emphatically not a reference book. Mr. Largo organizes his material alphabetically—Absinthe (Artemisia absinthium , commonly known as Wormwood) to Zubrowka (Hierochloe odorata, used for Polish vodka). But some plants are listed by their Latin name (Welwitschia mirabilis), some by their common name (Marigold), and others by more idiosyncratic label (Beer Plant). There's no list of plants or index to help you relocate that tantalizing tidbit of information you've half-forgotten. The bibliography is short and includes no online material, and there are no notes to enable you to check up on information that had raised your eyebrows. For instance, Mr. Largo tells us that the word "avocado" descends from the Aztec word for testicle (ahuacatl). At harvest time, he says, Aztec virgins weren't allowed outside lest lustful thoughts be planted in them. Cool! But how would any kid eager for salacious botanical details search for more? Is the source an Aztec one? Did the information get filtered through Spanish priests? Is it a story told by the avocado growers' association?
Not surprisingly, such a densely showy habitat is a breeding ground for weedy "facts" masquerading as the real thing. Here are some I noticed: Apollo turned not a dead stag but the weeping boy Cyparissus into the Cypress with its sticky sap. Shodo Island, which only started growing olives in 1908, is not "one of the cradles of olive cultivation"—unless you were to add "in Japan." Speaking of olives, Jesus, on his entry to Jerusalem, did not meet the crowds wearing an olive branch, as Mr. Largo claims.
Sometimes the book can simultaneously instruct and mislead. In the entry for Hemlock, for instance, Mr. Largo makes sure we know that the drink that killed Socrates came not from the hemlock tree, which is in the nonpoisonous pine family, but rather from the hemlock shrub. At the same time, he tells us Socrates was "sentenced to death . . . for his belief in humanistic and democratic principles." Now that's the sort of misinformation that can fatally corrupt the young.
At least one mistake is downright unfair. My heart bleeds for an unjustly maligned tomato that Mr. Largo describes as a "new such [genetically modified] species grown in greenhouses in Great Britain . . . dubbed 'Moneymaker,' which says everything about the motivation behind genetically modifying plants." But "Moneymaker," which is indeed an English greenhouse variety, is a cultivar that is at least 60 years old: You can buy its seeds through heirloom catalogs. And whatever you might think about genetic modifications, many plants predating Monsanto have been developed with profit in mind, including my son's favorite tomato to grow, dating from the 1940s, called Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter.
"The Big, Bad Book of Botany" is definitely big and sometimes bad. But it has all the exuberance of a kid's garden: colorful, indiscriminate and not dug too deep. Plant this book in someone's vacation house or on the bedside table of a guest—who knows what might flower forth?
—Ms. Mullen writes for the Hudson Review and Barnes and Noble Review.
Tropical Botanic Artists News 2014