Ruth Kassinger’s GARDEN OF MARVELS was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon in the Science category.！
A GARDEN OF MARVELS: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of Plants by RUTH KASSINGER
In a GARDEN OF MARVELS, she learns by retracing the progress of the 18th-century European proto-scientists who banished myths and misunderstandings and discovered the basics of plant physiology. She visits with farmers and gardeners whose extraordinary plants––one-ton pumpkins, an utterly black petunia, a bio-fuel grass that grows 15-feet tall, and the only animal that lives by photosynthesizing––vividly demonstrate how plants work. Taking her insights into her own garden, she nurtures a “fruit-cocktail” tree, inoculates a failing coffee plant with beneficial fungi, prunes a denuded kumquat tree to make it leaf out, and gets her plants to text her when they’re thirsty.
Weaving personal anecdote, accessible science, and untold history, the ever- engaging author takes us along a new and eye-opening journey in her garden––and yours.