Charles Bixler Heiser's Books

Of Plants and People

By: Charles Bixler Heiser

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What are the origins of agriculture? How did people learn to domesticate plants? How did they come to improve some? How did they learn special techniques for processing certain plants for food? In these highly personal and informal essays-old-fashioned botany, the author calls them-noted botanist Charles Heiser investigates those and other questions raised by the interactions of plants and people. His purpose is to try to find the origins of some of our domesticated plants and to consider other plants that might someday contribute to our food resources. In Of Plants and People, Heiser examines the origins of pumpkins, squashes, and other cucurbits. In The Totora and Thor, he digresses from food plants to trace the spread of the totora reed from South America to Pacific islands. Little Oranges of Quito is about the domestication of a wild plant, the naranjilla, that is going on today. Chenopods: From Weeds to the Halls of Montezuma concerns the uses of the Andean quinua and its relatives, and Sangorache and the Day of the Dead, A Trip to Tulcán, and Chochos and Other Lupines all examine Latin-American domestic plants that could contribute to our own foods. Green ‘Tomatoes’ and Purple 'Cucumbers, the tomate and the pepino, respectively, describes two other crops that have received scant notice in the United States. The subject of "How Many Kinds of Peppers Are There?" is the genus Capsicum, with its sweet green and hot red peppers and all their related species and varieties. Heiser again writes about nonfood plants in the essay "Peperomias," but in the next chapter, "Sumpweed," he discusses a plant that was once used for food but that has been neglected in favor of others. And in "A Plague of Locusts" the author compares the honey locust tree with a close relative to try to determine what gives particular plants advantages in certain environments. In his final essay, Seeds, Sex, and Sacrifice, Heiser relates myth, anthropological evidence, and botanical findings to review the connection between religion and the origin of agriculture. The audience for this book will include botanists, horticulturists, anthropologists, and any reader interested in the interrelationships between plants and people.

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264

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806124105

ISBN 13

9780806124100

The Gourd Book

By: Charles B. Heiser

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The Gourd Book

By: Charles B. Heiser

Humankind has had a long and intimate association with gourds, and one of them, the bottle gourd, or calabash, may have been man's first cultivated plant. Although grown in the United States today primarily as ornamentals, in other parts of the world gourds have many other important uses. With charming text and stunning black-and-white photographs, The Gourd Book provides fascinating scientific information and folklore about these remarkable plants and keys for identifying species. The first part of the book deals with tree gourds, widely used as containers and for decoration; the Cucurbita gourds, including the buffalo gourd, the Turk's turban, the silver-seed gourd, and the Malabar gourd, all utilized as food, and the beautiful ornamental gourds; the loofah gourds, popular as cosmetic sponges; minor gourds, such as the snake, wax, bitter, teasel, and hedgehog, sometimes used as food or medicine; and gourds mentioned in the Bible. The second part takes up the bottle gourd, which has been used for thousands of years. Even today this gourd is almost indispensable in many parts of the tropics, where species are used to make containers, musical instruments, and clothing, as food and medicine, and in art. The book concludes with a discussion of the gourd in folklore and myth and an appendix on growing, hybridizing, and preserving gourds for decoration. Delightfully written for general readers, this book will also appeal to botanists, anthropologists, horticulturists, and everyone interested in plants or gardening.

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Page Count

270

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806155671

ISBN 13

9780806155678

Of Plants and People

By: Charles Bixler Heiser

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Of Plants and People

By: Charles Bixler Heiser

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Page Count

264

Publisher

University of Oklahoma Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0806124105

ISBN 13

9780806124100

Weeds in My Garden

Observations on Some Misunderstood Plants

By: Charles Bixler Heiser

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Weeds in My Garden

Observations on Some Misunderstood Plants

By: Charles Bixler Heiser

The weeds are arranged by family because the author, a retired botany professor, cannot resist trying to turn other people into botanists, and it helps to know something about a plant's relatives. In the mode of his sixteenth-century forebear John Gerard, Charles Heiser discusses each weed according to The Name, common and scientific, The Time and Place, of flowering, and from where the plant originally came, The Description, and The Virtues, in which he relates fascinating weedy tales in a witty, conversational style.".

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Page Count

247

Publisher

Timber Press (OR)

Published Date

ISBN 10

0881925624

ISBN 13

9780881925623

Book's by Charles Bixler Heiser

Of Plants and People

Of Plants and People

The Gourd Book

The Gourd Book

Of Plants and People

Of Plants and People

Weeds in My Garden

Weeds in My Garden

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