Beautiful and brimming with information, this indispensable guide contains all the advice you'll ever need--even if your thumb is brown--to create a gorgeous yard, a bountiful vegetable garden, or a lush green indoors.More than 400 full-color photos let you see exactly what plants look like--from flowers to trees to vegetables--both close up and in garden settings.More than 115 drawings show you how to step by step all the tricks to caring for a variety of plants.One hundred pages of illustrated plant portfolios and 65 pages of handy charts give you thorough descriptions of more than 800 plants, diseases and pests.

    Adam Leith Gollner weaves business, science, and travel into a riveting narrative about one of earth’s most desired foods.Readers will discover why even though countless exotic fruits exist in nature, only several dozen varieties are vailable in supermarkets. Gollner explores the political machinations of multinational fruit corporations, exposing the hidden alliances between agribusiness and government and what that means for public health. He traces the life of mass-produced fruits – how they are created, grown, and marketed, and he explores the underworld of fruits that are inaccessible, ignored, and even forbidden in the Western world.Gollner draws readers into a Willy Wonka-like world with mangoes that taste like piña coladas, orange cloudberries, peanut butter fruits, and the miracle fruit that turns everything sour sweet, making lemons taste like lemonade. Peopled with a varied and bizarre cast of characters – from smugglers to explorers to inventors – this extraordinary book unveils the hidden universe of fruit.

    Most conservationists and environmentalists share this view. But what if the traditional view of ecology is wrong—what if true environmentalists should be applauding the invaders? In The New Wild, Pearce goes on a journey across six continents to rediscover what conservation in the twenty-first century should be about. Pearce explores ecosystems from remote Pacific islands to the United Kingdom, from San Francisco Bay to the Great Lakes, as he digs into questionable estimates of the cost of invader species and reveals the outdated intellectual sources of our ideas about the balance of nature. Pearce acknowledges that there are horror stories about alien species disrupting ecosystems, but most of the time, the tens of thousands of introduced species usually swiftly die out or settle down and become model eco-citizens. The case for keeping out alien species, he finds, looks increasingly flawed. As Pearce argues, mainstream environmentalists are right that we need a rewilding of the earth, but they are wrong if they imagine that we can achieve that by reengineering ecosystems. Humans have changed the planet too much, and nature never goes backward. But a growing group of scientists is taking a fresh look at how species interact in the wild. According to these new ecologists, we should applaud the dynamism of alien species and the novel ecosystems they create. In an era of climate change and widespread ecological damage, it is absolutely crucial that we find ways to help nature regenerate. Embracing the new ecology, Pearce shows us, is our best chance. To be an environmentalist in the twenty-first century means celebrating nature’s wildness and capacity for change.

    In what began as groundbreaking three-part series in the New Yorker, for which she won a National Magazine Award in 2006, Kolbert cuts through the competing rhetoric and political agendas to elucidate for Americans what is really going on with the global environment and asks what, if anything, can be done to save our planet. Now updated and with a new afterword, Field Notes from a Catastrophe is the book to read on the defining issue and greatest challenge of our times.

    Both the book and film were inspired by a series of multimedia presentations on global warming that Gore created and delivers to groups around the world. With this book, Gore, who is one of our environmental heroes—and a leading expert—brings together leading-edge research from top scientists around the world; photographs, charts, and other illustrations; and personal anecdotes and observations to document the fast pace and wide scope of global warming. He presents, with alarming clarity and conclusiveness—and with humor, too—that the fact of global warming is not in question and that its consequences for the world we live in will be disastrous if left unchecked. This riveting new book—written in an accessible, entertaining style—will open the eyes of even the most skeptical.

    In A Garden of Marvels, she extends the story. Frustrated by plants that fail to thrive, she sets out to understand the basics of botany in order to become a better gardener. She retraces the progress of the first botanists who banished myths and misunderstandings and discovered that flowers have sex, leaves eat air, roots choose their food, and hormones make morning glories climb fence posts. She also visits modern gardens, farms, and labs to discover the science behind extraordinary plants like one-ton pumpkins, a truly black petunia, a biofuel grass that grows twelve feet tall, and the world's only photosynthesizing animal. Transferring her insights to her own garden, she nurtures a "cocktail" tree that bears five kinds of fruit, cures a Buddha's Hand plant with beneficial fungi, and gets a tree to text her when it's thirsty. Intertwining personal anecdote, accessible science, and untold history, the ever-engaging author takes us on an eye-opening journey into her garden - and yours.

    In this extraordinary feat of nature writing, we meet ants who harvest crops, raise insects as livestock, build roadways and bridges, embark on nuptial flights, and make war.

    From Colorado to California, China to Canada, the narrative hopscotches the globe and takes readers to the frontlines of the battle both on the ground and in the air, and in the laboratories, universities, and federal agencies where this issue rages on. Through this prism of perspectives, Kodas zeroes in on a handful of the most terrifying and tumultuous of these environmental disasters in recent years—the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona that took the lives of nineteen elite “hotshot” firefighters, the Waldo Canyon Fire that overwhelmed the city of Colorado Springs—and more in a page-turning narrative that puts a face on the brave people at the heart of this issue. Megafire describes the profound impact of these fires around the earth and will change the way we think about the environment and the essential precariousness of our world.

    Dissecting everything from tractors and pigs to fences, hay bales, crop rotation patterns, and farm tools, Rothman gives a richly entertaining tour of the quirky details of country life. From the shapes of squash varieties to the parts of a goat; from how a barn is constructed to what makes up a beehive, every corner of the barnyard is uncovered and celebrated. A perfect gift for gardeners, locavores, homesteaders, and country-living enthusiasts alike.

    Shrouded in mystery, Gregor Mendel's quiet life and discoveries make for fascinating reading. Among his pea plants Henig finds a tale filled with intrigue, jealousy, and a healthy dose of bad timing. She "has done a remarkable job of fleshing out the myth with what few facts there are" (Washington Post Book World) and has delivered Mendel's story with grace and glittering prose. THE MONK IN THE GARDEN is both a "classic tale of redemption" (New York Times Book Review) and a science book of the highest literary order.

    With meticulous illustrations and detailed descriptions of plants and animals found in every corner of the continent, this newly updated and revised edition is the perfect companion in the field and a storehouse of information for the armchair naturalist or student.

    Yet when it comes to fungi, culinary uses are only the tip of the iceberg. Throughout history fungus has been prized for its diverse properties—medicinal, ecological, even recreational—and hasspawned its own quirky subculture dedicated to exploring the weird biology and celebrating the unique role it plays on earth. In Mycophilia, accomplished food writer and cookbook author Eugenia Bone examines the role of fungi as exotic delicacy, curative, poison, and hallucinogen, and ultimately discovers that a greater understanding of fungi is key to facing many challenges of the 21st century.Engrossing, surprising, and packed with up-to-date science and cultural exploration, Mycophilia is part narrative and part primer for foodies, science buffs, environmental advocates, and anyone interested in learning a lot about one of the least understood and most curious organisms in nature.

    In this fun and informative guide, her first for puppies, she teaches you how to navigate each stage of a puppy's growth, from the first weeks through adolescence. You'll learn:- puppy-proofing your home- toilet training- building leash-walking and play skills- preventing nipping and excessive barking- caring for your puppy's health- and more!

    Revised to reflect the latest research in the field, this book emphasizes the relationships and concepts that link cell and tissue structures with their functions. A bonus image library CD-ROM featuring all the photos and illustrations from the text with "zoom in" and "zoom out" capability is also included.

    Access to texts such as the Lost Book of Enoch, the Nag Hamadi Gospels, and the Book of Jubilees, among others is now widely available and, when synthesized and correlated with existing documents like the Bible and Qu'ran, merits rethinking Western civilization's origins and intent.Prepare yourself for a profound belief-challenging journey through ancient Persia, Sumer, Greece, and Atlantis; from Rome to the United States, HQ of the New Atlantis. This book is not like any other in the field: expect the winged-warrior aerial perspective of an Army Attack helicopter pilot, the BS filter of an Electrical Engineer, a Western Medicine-challenging Structural Integrator, and Southern California didgeridoo player all at the same time. Energy and matter, sound entrainment, slave control design methods using the electromagnetic spectrum, eternal life, gravity, and DMT are addressed herein.U.S. public school history ignores the Sumerians, although they are credited with all aspects of modern civilization, influencing both Egypt and Greece alike. Television series produced by the History Channel, like the "Ancient Aliens" Series is assisting the masses in waking up to the fact that the Anunnaki were not a myth, having left physical documents and artifacts backing up their claims to have created mankind, described in highly sophisticated language, as recorded by Atrahasis.It was in South Africa, where the idea was spawned to create a primitive worker, namely mankind, to operate the gold mines, provide temple building manpower, and generally serve every whim the Ancient Astronauts from Nibiru conceived of. Many of the Niburians, referenced in the Biblical Genesis as the Elohim, known to the Sumerians as the Anunnaki, were enthroned as Gods in Mesopotamia.Perhaps it is fitting for Westerners to look into the religious and historical origins for the kings and demigods of Sumer, the first culture to provide evidence of the cuneiform script language, complete with no antecedent. Not only were mundane records, detailed as they were, kept on clay tablets, tens of thousands of which survive to this day, but the history and direct experience accounts of some of the famed inhabitants, like king Gilgamesh of Uruk, introduce us to "Those who from Heaven to Earth Came." The Anunnaki astronauts hailed from a planet, Nibiru, in our own solar system, whose apogee resides in a 3,600 retrograde elliptical orbit beyond Pluto. According to their records, likely using spectroscopy as scientists do today, they located gold on planet Earth. Due to a failing atmosphere on Nibiru, Anu their king, dispatched his preeminent scientist and first-born son, Enki, on a space mission to Earth to recover enough gold that could be ionized in a layer of their atmosphere, as a solar radiation shieldAnunnaki gold mines in Africa have been found and carbon dated. Mining operations were occurring at the exact time and location that the "Genetic Eve Study" indicates: Womankind's genetic origins are undeniably linked to Enki's gold mining operation. Egyptian Queen Sheba's mines ring a bell? Michael Tellinger followed the Sumerian account to Africa, locating many of the mines, homes and temples used by the primitive workers and gods, our true ancestors.Additional source material and limited genealogy tables are included in the Bibliography and Appendix for the reader to explore. More exhaustive ones are available by contacting the author. Now consider your place in the unfolding New World Order. Will you choose the Enlilites or Enkiites to affiliate with, or do you have a choice? Enjoy this intellectual read, it is mind-bending, pineal-gland stimulating, and worth it! Available as Hardback, Audio Book, and Kindle Now!