Starting a plant from seed is one of a gardener’s greatest joys. But the importance of seeds in our lives goes way beyond that simple pleasure. Thor Hanson, a conservation biologist, reveals that importance in his book The Triumph of Seeds. Hanson explains how the development of seed-bearing plants made life as we know it possible.
The trip he takes us on spans the globe and eons of time, but never lacks focus as he guides us through the five sections of the book: Seeds Nourish, Seeds Unite, Seeds Endure, Seeds Defend, and Seeds Travel. Through personal anecdotes, interviews with experts, and a lot of research—the bibliography is 15 pages—Hanson certainly gave this seed-sower a deeper appreciation of the 352,000 seed-bearing plants on the planet.
Fierce Energy is the title of the introduction, which sets the book’s tone and pace as readers travel with Hanson from a Kibbutz in the Negev Desert in Israel to the wheat fields of the Palouse in Washington state. He also takes us back in time to the Monastery of St. Thomas, in Moravia, where Gregor Mendel experimented with peas and laid the groundwork for the study of genetics, and to the bottom of an American Southwest canyon wher...
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