Flowering Earth [Paperback]

Even a diehard urbanite would likely be seduced by this extraordinary chronicle of the plant kingdom... Publishers Weekly

... much more than the fascinating story of plant life... It is also a book about the resilience of life itself, the mystery and power of the unseen energy appearing in the visible world in a marvelous variety of forms. Audubon Naturalist News

Here is Mr. Peattie at his superb best.... [H]e makes the story of botany and its pursuit as fascinating to the reader as it is to him, and the reading of it a delight. Hartford Times

[Peattie] belongs with Gilbert White, Thoreau, John Burroughs, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jeffries, and John Muir. Mark van Doren

First published in 1939, this beautifully imaginative book is about botany much in the same sense that Walden is about a pond. Part natural history, part biography, and part philosophical reflection, Flowering Earth is written in a warm, lyrical style that made poet-scientist Donald Culross Peattie one of America's best-known naturalist writers.

Foreword
I. On Striking Your Roots
II. On Branching Out
III. Chlorophyll: the Sun Trap
IV. What a Plant Is
V. Protoplasmthe Body of Life
VI. The Seeds of Life
VII. The First Algas
VIII. The Seaweeds
IX. The Fern Forests
X. Diatoms-Grass of the Sea
XI. Conifers and Cycads
XII. The Rise of the Modern Floras
XIII. A Transplanting
XIV. A Garden Alliance
XV. The Moment of Flowering
XVI. The Sleep of the Seed
XVII. Growth
XVIII. The Web of Life

Afterword
Index