Booktopia has been placed into Voluntary Administration. Orders have been temporarily suspended, whilst the process for the recapitalisation of Booktopia and/or sale of its business is completed, following which services may be re-established. All enquiries from creditors, including customers with outstanding gift cards and orders and placed prior to 3 July 2024, please visit https://www.mcgrathnicol.com/creditors/booktopia-group/
Add free shipping to your order with these great books
Orchid : A Cultural History - Jim Endersby

Orchid

A Cultural History

By: Jim Endersby

Hardcover | 15 October 2016 | Edition Number 1

Sorry, we are not able to source the book you are looking for right now.

We did a search for other books with a similar title, however there were no matches. You can try selecting from a similar category, click on the author's name, or use the search box above to find your book.

At once delicate, exotic, and elegant, orchids are beloved for their singular, instantly recognizable beauty. Found in nearly every climate, the many species of orchids have carried symbolic weight in countless cultures over time. The ancient Greeks associated them with fertility and thought that a parent who ingested the orchid root could determine the gender of a child. During the Victorian era, orchids became deeply associated with romance and seduction. And in twentieth–century hard-boiled detective stories, they transformed into symbols of decadence, secrecy, and cunning. What is it about the orchid that has enthralled the imagination for so many centuries? And why do they still provoke so much wonder? To answer, Jim Endersby offers a unique cultural history of this captivating family of plants.

Following the stories of orchids throughout history, Endersby divides our attraction to them into four key themes: science, empire, sex, and death. He explore how these have shaped orchids and how orchids, in return, have shaped our own investigations and associations. When it comes to empire, for instance, orchids are a prime example of the exotic riches sought by Europeans as they shaped their plans for colonization. Endersby also reveals how Charles Darwin's theory of evolution became intimately entangled with the story of the orchid as he investigated their methods of cross-pollination. As Endersby shows, orchids - perhaps because of their extraordinarily diverse colors, shapes, and sizes - have also bloomed repeatedly in films, novels, plays, and poems, from Shakespeare to science fiction, from hard-boiled thrillers to elaborate modernist novels.

Featuring many gorgeous illustrations from the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Orchid: A Cultural History tells, for the first time, the extraordinary story of orchids and our prolific interest in them. It is a tale sure to enchant not only gardeners and plant collectors, but anyone curious about the flower's obsessive hold on the imagination in history, cinema, literature, and more.

About the Author

Jim Endersby is a reader in the history of science at the University of Sussex. He is the author of A Guinea Pig's History of Biology and Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science.
Industry Reviews
"A wonderful collection of orchid miscellanea. It's a very well-written, abundantly illustrated, fact-filled foray into the weird and wonderful world of the orchid family. Executed with impressive breadth and depth of knowledge, and respect and sensitivity for the ancient cultural associations between people and the plants, this is a wonderful book . . . Orchid is another great addition to Reaktion Books' plants-and-people-themed Botanical series."-- "Plant Cuttings"
"Jim Endersby's sparklingly written and beautifully illustrated Orchid: A Cultural History shows how over centuries a single charismatic plant family embodied at different times and places some combination of virility, seduction, guile, splendor, and luxury."-- "Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences"
"Orchid: A Cultural History explores the associations that have endowed this flower with significance, and describes how the orchid's identity has run the gamut from romance and seduction to decadence and cunning. Endersby understands the importance of making science accessible to a general audience, and in Orchid he initially grabs readers' attention by emphasizing the plant's historic identity as an aphrodisiac."-- "The Weekly Standard"
"Orchid compellingly demonstrates that the cultural history of these plants is as strange, wonderful, and varied--and as full of sexual mystery--as orchids are themselves. The relationships between the stories of orchids told by scientists and those told by writers, filmmakers, collectors, and journalists prove to be, like the relationships between orchids and their pollinators, overwhelmingly cases of cross-fertilization."-- "Jonathan Smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn"
"Featuring many gorgeous illustrations from the collection of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Orchid: A Cultural History tells, for the first time, the extraordinary story of orchids and our prolific interest in them. It is an enchanting tale not only for gardeners and plant collectors, but anyone curious about the flower's obsessive hold on the imagination in history, cinema, literature, and more."-- "Pollinia"
"In his book Orchid: a Cultural History, Jim Endersby explains how people ate orchid roots in a dish, ground them up and drank them in wine or goat's milk -- to incite lust or suppress it; to have male children or female children or none at all. In ancient Thessaly, they were rumoured to use orchid roots to both cure and cause venereal disease. Pity the poor orchid for being so misunderstood! There are still orchids blooming on the shores of the Mediterranean, and if you look at what they're doing, a separate, intricate world is revealed. The flowers are advertising sex alright -- just not with us in mind!"-- "CBC Radio"
"In this account, stories of how the mysterious orchid has gradually become known to science are inseparable from the peculiarities of orchid morphology and reproduction as much as from societal shifts in religion, class, gender, colonialism, and industrialization. Through this wide scope, from literature and cinema to herbaria specimens, from ancient Greek plant lore to today's pressing anxieties about climate change, Orchids raises important questions about how to account for the long expanses, complexities, and dramatic shifts of botanical history--and why it matters. It is at once eloquent, illuminating, accessible, and witty."-- "H-Net Reviews"

More in Earth Sciences

Living Hot : Surviving and Thriving on a Heating Planet - Clive Hamilton
Sing Like Fish : how sound rules life under water - Amorina Kingdon

RRP $36.99

$33.25

10%
OFF
Oxford Science 9 Student Book+Student obook pro : Victorian Curriculum, 2nd Edition - Helen Silvester
Oxford Science 9 Student Book+obook pro : 2nd Edition - Australian Curriculum - Helen Silvester
Oxford Science 10 Student Book+obook pro : 2nd Edition - Australian Curriculum - Helen Silvester
Conceptual Integrated Science : 3rd Edition - Paul Hewitt

RRP $133.50

$133.25

Oxford Science 8 Student Book+obook pro : 2nd Edition - Australian Curriculum - Helen Silvester
Fossils : 300 of the Earth's Fossilized Species - Carl Mehling

FREE SHIPPING

RRP $22.99

$21.90

Earth : 7th Edition - Portrait of a Planet - Stephen Marshak

RRP $164.95

$141.25

14%
OFF
The Physics of Climate Change - Lawrence M. Krauss

RRP $22.99

$21.90

Fundamentals of Conservation Biology : 4th edition - Malcolm L. Hunter

RRP $184.75

$101.35

45%
OFF
Earth 12ed : An Introduction to Physical Geology, Global Edition - Edward Tarbuck
Structural Geology : 2nd edition - Haakon Fossen

RRP $94.95

$82.25

13%
OFF
Aquaculture 3ed : Farming Aquatic Animals and Plants - John S. Lucas

RRP $190.95

$112.35

41%
OFF
Earth's Climate : 3rd Edition - Past and Future - William F. Ruddiman

RRP $181.95

$142.90

21%
OFF
Fundamentals of Hydrology : 3rd Edition - Tim Davie

RRP $92.99

$79.35

15%
OFF
ISE Natural Disasters : 11th Edition - Patrick Leon Abbott

RRP $154.95

$126.95

18%
OFF