plants

Dr. Katie Takayasu is an Integrative Medicine physician, author, and speaker in the holistic health space, bridging the gap between traditional Western medicine and the evidenced-based complementary health tools of nutrition, acupuncture, meditation, botanicals and lifestyle optimization. She is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine at Columbia University/New York Presbyterian and teaches the next generation of doctors about healing the whole patient mind, body and spirit. Joe Donahue spoke with her at a CulinaryArts@SPAC event on March 25, 2023. Dr. Katie Takayasu’s book is “Plants First: A Physician’s Guide to Wellness Through a Plant-Forward Diet.”

"Brave the Wild River" by Melissa L. Sevigny tells the riveting tale of two pioneering botanists and their historic boat trip down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. The book is a spellbinding adventure of two women, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter, who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.

Cynthia Wick’s “Floraborealis,” on display at Berkshire Botanical Garden through August 27th, features joyous, incandescent paintings that emerged out of the dark Covid years of isolation, when the artist took refuge in her studio in Lenox, MA, going inward for inspiration and exploring her memories of color, light and beauty.

In "Becoming a Gardener," Catie Marron chronicles her transformation into a gardener over the course of eighteen months, seeding the details of her experience with rich advice from writers as diverse as Eleanor Perényi and Karel Capek, Penelope Lively, and Jamaica Kincaid.

Writer of the James Beard award-winning Washington Post column "Unearthed," prolific food journalist, and self-proclaimed “crappy gardener” Tamar Haspel is on a mission: to show us that raising or gathering our own food is not as hard as it’s often made out to be. When she and her husband move from Manhattan to two acres on Cape Cod with no skills to speak of, they decide to adopt a more active approach to their diet: raising chickens, growing tomatoes, even foraging for mushrooms and hunting their own meat. The new book is: "To Boldly Grow: Finding Joy, Adventure and Dinner in Your Own Backyard." It is a fresh take on eating real food, and an tale of finding success, happiness and purpose when you just go out and do it, no expertise required. Tamar Haspel writes the James Beard Award-winning Washington Post column Unearthed, which tackles food from every angle: agriculture, nutrition, obesity, the food environment, and DIY.

In her book, "The Plant Hunter: A Scientist's Quest for Nature's Next Medicines" (Viking), Dr. Cassandra Quave weaves together science, botany, and memoir to tell us the extraordinary story of her own journey. Traveling by canoe, ATV, mule, airboat, and on foot, she has conducted field research in the flooded forests of the remote Amazon, the murky swamps of southern Florida, the rolling hills of central Italy, isolated mountaintops in Albania and Kosovo, and volcanic isles arising out of the Mediterranean—all in search of natural compounds, long-known to traditional healers, that could help save us all from the looming crisis of untreatable superbugs.

The Clark Art Institute's exhibition "Claude & François-Xavier Lalanne: Nature Transformed" is the first American museum exhibition of the French artists'…

Suzanne Simard is one of the world's leading forest ecologist who forever changed how people view trees and their connections to one another and to other…

The garden is often seen as a refuge, a place to forget worldly cares, removed from the “real” life that lies outside. But when we get our hands in the…

Melons are among the world’s most important vegetable crops. The new book "The Melon" is produced by Amy Goldman in collaboration with celebrated…