Granny's Green Thumb - Part 1

Botany for Gardeners is divided into five sections, each dealing with some component of plant life from Growth, through Organization, Adaptation and Functions to Reproduction. Plant Adaptations in a Hostile World is divided into chapters based on various environments from Deciduous Forests to Artic and Alpine Winters, Tropical Rain Forests, and Deserts, and finally Surviving in Water. Each book deals in a different fashion with similar problems.

Take, for example, water. The gardener who wonders how water moves from soil into a root and then up the stem to a leaf will find a clear and descriptive answer in Botany for Gardeners. Diagrams showing this observable fact and information about it are in Chapter 8, The Uptake and Use of Water, Minerals and Light. In Plant Adaptations in a Hostile World, however, we read that the problem is not so much how to obtain water, but how to keep it. Plants in each environment show different strategies for keeping and utilizing water.

Sex in Your Garden by Angela Overy, a dedicated gardener and illustrator, is one of the most light-hearted books I have ever read on a plainly do-or-die subject. The premise of this lavishly illustrated book is that bright blooms are just advertisements for sex.

Most gardeners do not know that plant sex may utilize bribes (nectar and honey are only two) and that there may also be pain and shame, murder and fraud. Incest must be avoided, and intimate partners are often fauna rather than flora.

The greater part of this out of the ordinary book is taken up by examples of The Ultimate Advertising Campaign - how flowers lure pollinators. Readers are guided to looking for devices used in the competitive field of being pollinated - colors, scents, shapes, size, hairiness and landing platforms. The final chapter gives an idea of what it takes for offspring to leave home through the dispersal of seeds.

Reaching for the Sun: How Plants Work by John King, answers questions like: Plants are cool, but why? King, Professor of Biology at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, utilizes the means available to science in the last half of the 20th century to tell readers about how plants grow and survive and what makes up the normal life of a plant.

Chapter 1 tantalizes readers by explaining why grass is cooler on a hot day than concrete or sand.

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