Download or read book Orchidelirium written by Deborah Landau and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 94 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Poetry. Winner of the 2003 Anhinga Prize for Poetry, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. "You'll find a stunning cleanliness of movement and image in these delicious, evocative, sexy poems. Hooray for a writer who can weave presence and absence, longing and loss of longing, into a tapestry of language as rich, honest, and compelling as this"--Naomi Shihab Nye. "With depth, assurance, and astonishing savoir faire Landau makes ORCHIDELIRIUM a genuine orchid of a book, a vivid and riveting new bloom in American letters"--Molly Peacock.
Download or read book Orchidelirium written by Harold Feinstein and published by Bulfinch. This book was released on 2007-02-07 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting Feinstein's breathtaking full-color photographs of orchids--dozens of different varieties and shades--this new volume offers images of staggering detail and subtlety.
Download or read book The Orchid Thief written by Susan Orlean and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK A modern classic of personal journalism, The Orchid Thief is Susan Orlean’s wickedly funny, elegant, and captivating tale of an amazing obsession. Determined to clone an endangered flower—the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii—a deeply eccentric and oddly attractive man named John Laroche leads Orlean on an unforgettable tour of America’s strange flower-selling subculture, through Florida’s swamps and beyond, along with the Seminoles who help him and the forces of justice who fight him. In the end, Orlean—and the reader—will have more respect for underdog determination and a powerful new definition of passion. In this new edition, coming fifteen years after its initial publication and twenty years after she first met the “orchid thief,” Orlean revisits this unforgettable world, and the route by which it was brought to the screen in the film Adaptation, in a new retrospective essay. Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more. Praise for The Orchid Thief “Stylishly written, whimsical yet sophisticated, quirkily detailed and full of empathy . . . The Orchid Thief shows [Orlean’s] gifts in full bloom.”—The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating . . . an engrossing journey [full] of theft, hatred, greed, jealousy, madness, and backstabbing.”—Los Angeles Times “Orlean’s snapshot-vivid, pitch-perfect prose . . . is fast becoming one of our national treasures.”—The Washington Post Book World “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description.”—Boston Sunday Globe “A swashbuckling piece of reporting that celebrates some virtues that made America great.”—The Wall Street Journal
Download or read book The Book of Orchids written by Mark W. Chase and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of every seven flowering plants on earth is an orchid. Some are stunningly over the top; others almost inconspicuous. The Orchidaceae is the second most widely geographically distributed family, after the grasses, yet remains one of the least understood. This book will profile 600 species, representing the remarkable and unexpected diversity and complexity in the taxonomy and phylogeny of these beguiling plants, and the extraordinary means they have evolved in order to ensure the attraction of pollinators. Each species entry includes life-size photographs to capture botanical detail, as well as information on distribution, peak flowering period, and unique attributes--both natural and cultural. The result is a work which will attract and allure, much as the orchids themselves do.
Download or read book Orchidelirium written by Dave Carley and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Orchidelirium is a hothouse hybrid of fact and fiction, research and hypothesis, scent and sex. The name of the flower itself is derived from the Greek word â "òorchisâ" meaning testis. Through their resemblance to human and animal sexual organs, orchids were thought to stimulate lust. In fact, it was long believed that the flowers sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. For the Victorian Alice O'Keefe, who established one of America's great collections of orchids (before venturing into flora introduction), the delirium leads to environmental disaster. For Frances O'Keefe, the hothouse her ancestry built and which she fiercely protects, will once again fill with the flower of legend—and orchidelirium.
Download or read book Orchidelirium written by Corina L. Apostol and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On the disconnect between the colonial impulse to collect, consume, and commodify ecologies and the violent realities of the colonial experience. “Orchidelirium,” the orchid madness that gripped Europe over a century ago, is still alive and well. The Estonian presentation at the 59th Venice Biennale utilizes this moniker to highlight the disjuncture between the colonial impulse to collect, consume, and commodify ecologies and the violent realities of the colonial experiences in both Estonia and Indonesia. Using the power of art, visual cultures, and research, this project represents a conscious untangling of patriarchal, neocolonial visual vocabulary and attending structures, as new voices emerge, creating space for reflection and tools for understanding botanical lives. This collaborative project between artists Kristina Norman and Bita Razavi working in close dialogue with curator Corina L. Apostol has been invited to take place in the Dutch Rietveld Pavilion. Orchidelirium is in conversation with the presentation inside the pavilion, encompassing installations, films, photography, and performance connecting the past with the present, all through the lens of colonial botany and its socio-political ramifications. As such, it gives heightened awareness of the power of choices artists past and present can make to use visibility which has been afforded on an international stage, and how to talk about privilege. Orchidelirium expands on the topical discussions taking place today on colonial and neocolonial frameworks that are still with us, and as an extension, what forms art can take to challenge power structures rather than represent or describe them. The book is made up of several intertwining contributions: dialogues with Norman and Razavi analyze the works of contemporary artists working at the intersection of art, botany, science, and decolonial methods, while a timeline, commissioned essays, and a glossary of terms offer accessible viewpoints into the complex and multifaceted issues that inform and are raised by the art projects. The autonomous but interrelated contributions and dialogues, which either speak directly to the art projects by Norman and Razavi or follow lines of inquiry along with them, cover prospects from decolonial cultural studies, art criticism and art history, natural history, economic botany, critical race studies, and ecofeminism along with them.
Download or read book Deceptive Beauties written by Christian Ziegler and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-10-30 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confucius called them the “king of fragrant plants,” and John Ruskin condemned them as “prurient apparitions.” Across the centuries, orchids have captivated us with their elaborate exoticism, their powerful perfumes, and their sublime seductiveness. But the disquieting beauty of orchids is an unplanned marvel of evolution, and the story of orchids is as captivating as any novel. As acclaimed writer Michael Pollan and National Geographic photographer Christian Ziegler spin tales of orchid conquest in Deceptive Beauties: The World of Wild Orchids, we learn how these flowers can survive and thrive in the harshest of environments, from tropical cloud forests to the Arctic, from semi-deserts to rocky mountainsides; how their shapes, colors, and scents are, as Darwin put it, “beautiful contrivances” meant to dupe pollinating male insects in the strangest ways. What other flowers, after all, can mimic the pheromones and even appearance of female insects, so much so that some male bees prefer sex with the orchids over sex with their own kind? And insects aren’t the only ones to fall for the orchids’ charms. Since the “orchidelirium” of the Victorian era, humans have braved the wilds to search them out and devoted copious amounts of time and money propagating and hybridizing, nurturing and simply gazing at them. This astonishing book features over 150 unprecedented color photographs taken by Christian Ziegler himself as he trekked through wilderness on five continents to capture the diversity and magnificence of orchids in their natural habitats. His intimate and astonishing images allow us to appreciate up close nature’s most intoxicating and deceptive beauties.
Download or read book Orchid Muse A History of Obsession in Fifteen Flowers written by Erica Hannickel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2022-12-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the 2023 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award A kaleidoscopic journey into the world of nature’s most tantalizing flower, and the lives it has inspired. The epitome of floral beauty, orchids have long fostered works of art, tales of adventure, and scientific discovery. Tenacious plant hunters have traversed continents to collect rare specimens; naturalists and shoguns have marveled at orchids’ seductive architecture; royalty and the smart set have adorned themselves with their allure. In Orchid Muse, historian and home grower Erica Hannickel gathers these bold tales of the orchid-smitten throughout history, while providing tips on cultivating the extraordinary flowers she features. Consider Empress Eugenie and Queen Victoria, the two most powerful women in nineteenth-century Europe, who shared a passion for Coelogyne cristata, with its cascading, fragrant white blooms. John Roebling, builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, cultivated thousands of orchids and introduced captivating hybrids. Edmond Albius, an enslaved youth on an island off the coast of Madagascar, was the first person to hand-pollinate Vanilla planifolia, leading to vanilla’s global boom. Artist Frida Kahlo was drawn to the lavender petals of Cattleya gigas and immortalized the flower’s wilting form in a harrowing self-portrait, while more recently Margaret Mee painted the orchids she discovered in the Amazon to advocate for their conservation. The story of orchidomania is one that spans the globe, transporting readers from the glories of the palace gardens of Chinese Empress Cixi to a seedy dime museum in Gilded Age New York’s Tenderloin, from hazardous jungles to the greenhouses and bookshelves of Victorian collectors. Lush and inviting, with radiant full-color illustrations throughout, Orchid Muse is the ultimate celebration of our enduring fascination with these beguiling flowers.
Download or read book Wily Violets and Underground Orchids written by Peter Bernhardt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-05-17 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Peter Bernhardt takes us on a grand tour of the botanical realm, weaving engaging descriptions of the lovely shapes and intriguing habits of flowering plants with considerations of broader questions, such as why there are only six basic shapes of flowers and why the orchid family is so numerous and so bizarre. Everyone from amateur naturalists and gardeners to plant scientists will find Wily Violets and Underground Orchids a lively guide to botanical lore.
Download or read book Travels and Adventures of an Orchid Hunter written by Albert Millican and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Last Usable Hour written by Deborah Landau (Ph.D.) and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The poems of Landau's stunning second collection are dark, urgent, sexy, deeply sad, and, above all, powerful."--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Landau's intimate, lonely poems are profoundly engaged with the experience of the self in its starkest moments: when it is deprived, nocturnal, barely lingual...She creates a deeply erotic and resonant encounter between the lyric I and its solitude." --The Boston Review "She is both confessional and direct, like Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg. Her taut, elegant, highly controlled constructions meditate upon yearning and selfhood... Landau reminds us of the nuanced beauty of language as, through their directness, her tight, graceful poems make readers feel as if they spoke only to them." --Booklist "These beautiful harrowing poems are new-minted and young, but also age-old, broken and wise. She has found the perfect tone for her 'city of interiors.'"--Huffington Post "Hooray for a writer who can weave presence and absence, longing and loss of longing, into a tapestry of language as rich, honest, and compelling as this."--Naomi Shihab Nye "Landau registers the intensities of the flesh: pleasure, desire, limitation, and, ultimately, disappearance."--Mark Doty It is "always nighttime" in Deborah Landau's second collection--a series of linked lyric sequences, including insomniac epistolary love poems to an elusive "someone." Here is a haunted singing voice, clear and spare, alive with memory and desire, yet hounded by premonitions of a calamitous future. The speaker in this "ghost book" is lucid and passionate, even as everything is disappearing. blame the egg blame the fractured stones at the bottom of the mind blame his darkblue glare and craggy mug the bulky king of trudge and stein how I love a masculine in my parlor his grizzly shout and weight one hundred drums in this everywhere of blunt and soft sinking I am the heavy hollow snared the days are spring the days are summer the days are nothing and not dead yet Deborah Landau was educated at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a PhD in English and American literature. She co-hosts "Open Book" on Slate.com and is the Director of the NYU Creative Writing Program. She lives in the Soho neighborhood of New York City.
Download or read book The Cabaret of Plants Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination written by Richard Mabey and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-01-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Highly entertaining…Mabey gets us to look at life from the plants’ point of view." —Constance Casey, New York Times The Cabaret of Plants is a masterful, globe-trotting exploration of the relationship between humans and the kingdom of plants by the renowned naturalist Richard Mabey. A rich, sweeping, and wonderfully readable work of botanical history, The Cabaret of Plants explores dozens of plant species that for millennia have challenged our imaginations, awoken our wonder, and upturned our ideas about history, science, beauty, and belief. Going back to the beginnings of human history, Mabey shows how flowers, trees, and plants have been central to human experience not just as sources of food and medicine but as objects of worship, actors in creation myths, and symbols of war and peace, life and death. Writing in a celebrated style that the Economist calls “delightful and casually learned,” Mabey takes readers from the Himalayas to Madagascar to the Amazon to our own backyards. He ranges through the work of writers, artists, and scientists such as da Vinci, Keats, Darwin, and van Gogh and across nearly 40,000 years of human history: Ice Age images of plant life in ancient cave art and the earliest representations of the Garden of Eden; Newton’s apple and gravity, Priestley’s sprig of mint and photosynthesis, and Wordsworth’s daffodils; the history of cultivated plants such as maize, ginseng, and cotton; and the ways the sturdy oak became the symbol of British nationhood and the giant sequoia came to epitomize the spirit of America. Complemented by dozens of full-color illustrations, The Cabaret of Plants is the magnum opus of a great naturalist and an extraordinary exploration of the deeply interwined history of humans and the natural world.
Download or read book Daffodil written by Helen O'Neill and published by Flamingo. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully illustrated, visually lush and intriguing book about the world's most popular and most powerful flower. The daffodil is the beautiful first flower of spring, the inspiration of poets, a treasure-trove to scientists and a symbol of everything from unrequited love, rebirth, eternal life and misfortune. Over centuries, the daffodil has been so many things to so many people: it was called 'Narcissus' by the Greeks and prized by the Romans as guarantee of passage to the Underworld; it was used by medieval Arabs and ancient Chinese for its medicinal properties and it has inspired poets, lovers, artists and scientists down the ages. But in telling the story of the daffodil, what award-winning, best-selling writer Helen O'Neill is really telling is the story of humanity. It's a narrative of progress from superstition and myth, taking in politics, greed, religion, science, chance, redemption and love. But, appropriately enough for a flower that is now used on a worldwide basis to raise funds for cancer research, it is, above all, a story of hope. Moving, fascinating, eloquent, and also beautiful. 'O'Neill manages to make a biography of a flower feel like something of a detective novel, love story, historical drama and horticultural research paper rolled into one' Sydney Morning Herald
Download or read book This Is Not an Atlas written by kollektiv orangotango and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Is Not an Atlas gathers more than 40 counter-cartographies from all over the world. This collection shows how maps are created and transformed as a part of political struggle, for critical research or in art and education: from indigenous territories in the Amazon to the anti-eviction movement in San Francisco; from defending commons in Mexico to mapping refugee camps with balloons in Lebanon; from slums in Nairobi to squats in Berlin; from supporting communities in the Philippines to reporting sexual harassment in Cairo. This Is Not an Atlas seeks to inspire, to document the underrepresented, and to be a useful companion when becoming a counter-cartographer yourself.
Download or read book Orchidelirium Website written by and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala written by James Bateman and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 12 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Book of Orchids written by Mark Chase and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-03-30 with total page 657 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Clear, informative text. It is a superb production, reminding us of the astonishing diversity of these plants.” —Times Literary Supplement One in every seven flowering plants on earth is an orchid. Yet orchids retain an air of exotic mystery—and they remain remarkably misunderstood and underappreciated. The orchid family contains an astonishing array of colors, forms, and smells that captivate growers from all walks of life across the globe. Though undeniably elegant, the popular moth orchid—a grocery store standard—is a bland stand-in when compared with its thousands of more complex and fascinating brethren, such as the Demon Queller, which grows in dark forests where its lovely blooms are believed to chase evil forces away. Or the Fetid Sun-God, an orchid that lures female flies to lay their eggs on its flowers by emitting a scent of rancid cheese. The Book of Orchids revels in the diversity and oddity of these beguiling plants. Six hundred of the world’s most intriguing orchids are displayed, along with life-size photographs that capture botanical detail, as well as information about distribution, peak flowering period, and each species’ unique attributes, both natural and cultural. With over 28,000 known species, the orchid family is the largest and most geographically widespread of the flowering plant families. Including the most up-to-date science and accessibly written by botanists Mark Chase, Maarten Christenhusz, and Tom Mirenda, each entry in The Book of Orchids will entice researchers and orchid enthusiasts alike. “A luscious coffee-table tome.” —Nature
