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

About this book

David Attenborough meets Lemony Snicket in The Big, Bad Book of Botany, Michael Largo's entertaining and enlightening one-of-a-kind compendium of the world's most amazing and bizarre plants, their history, and their lore.

The Big, Bad Book of Botany introduces a world of wild, wonderful, and weird plants. Some are so rare, they were once more valuable than gold. Some found in ancient mythology hold magical abilities, including the power to turn a person to stone. Others have been used by assassins to kill kings, and sorcerers to revive the dead. Here, too, is vegetation with astonishing properties to cure and heal, many of which have long since been lost with the advent of modern medicine.

Organized alphabetically, The Big, Bad Book of Botany combines the latest in biological information with bizarre facts about the plant kingdom's oddest members, including a species that is more poisonous than a cobra and a prehistoric plant that actually "walked." Largo takes you through the history of vegetables and fruits and their astonishing agricultural evolution. Throughout, he reveals a astonishing facts, from where the world's first tree grew to whether plants are telepathic.

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Biography

Michael Largo is the author of God's Lunatics, Genius and Heroin, The Portable Obituary, the Bram Stoker Award-winning Final Exits: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of How We Die, The Big Bad Book of Beasts: The World's Most Curious Creatures and three novels. He is the former editor of New York Poetry and the researcher/archivist for the film company Allied Artists. He lives in Florida with his family.