With some 6,000 species of plants, Texas has extraordinary botanical wealth and diversity. Learning to identify plants is the first step in understanding their vital role in nature, and many field guides have been published for that purpose. But to fully appreciate how Texas's native plants have sustained people and animals from prehistoric times to the present, you need Remarkable Plants of Texas.

In this intriguing book, Matt Warnock Turner explores the little-known facts—be they archaeological, historical, material, medicinal, culinary, or cultural—behind our familiar botanical landscape. In sixty-five entries that cover over eighty of our most common native plants from trees, shrubs, and wildflowers to grasses, cacti, vines, and aquatics, he traces our vast array of connections with plants. Turner looks at how people have used plants for food, shelter, medicine, and economic subsistence; how plants have figured in the historical record and in Texas folklore; how plants nourish wildlife; and how some plants have unusual ecological or biological characteristics. Illustrated with over one hundred color photos and organized for easy reference, Remarkable Plants of Texas can function as a guide to individual species as well as an enjoyable natural history of our most fascinating native plants.

Plants, so predictable, stay where they are. And yet, like all living things, they also move: they grow, adapt, shed leaves and bark, spread roots and branches, snare pollinators, and reward cultivators. This book, the first to thoroughly explore the subject since Darwin’s 1881 treatise on movements in plants, is a comprehensive, up-to-date account of the mechanisms and the adaptive values that move plants.

Drawing on examples across the spectrum of plant families—including mosses, ferns, conifers, and flowering plants—the author opens a window on how plants move: within cells, as individual cells, and via organs. Opening with an explanation of how cellular motors work and how cells manage to move organs, Dov Koller considers the movement of roots, tubers, rhizomes, and other plant parts underground, as well as the more familiar stems, leaves, and flowers.

Throughout, Koller presents information at the subcellular and cellular levels, including the roles of receptors, signaling pathways, hormones, and physiological responses in motor function. He also discusses the adaptive significance of movements. His book exposes the workings of a world little understood and often overlooked, the world of restless plants and the movements by which they accomplish the necessary functions of their lives.

Originally published by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Office of Natural Environment to promote the planting and care of native plants along highway rights-of-way, this unique handbook provides managers of roadsides and adjacent lands with the information and background they need to make site-specific decisions about what kinds of native plants to use, and addresses basic techniques and misconceptions about using native plants. It brings together in a single volume a vast array of detailed information that has, until now, been scattered and difficult to find.The book opens with eighteen short essays on principles of ecological restoration and management from leading experts in the field including Reed F. Noss, J. Baird Callicott, Peggy Olwell, and Evelyn Howell. Following that is the heart of the book, more than 500 pages of comprehensive state-by-state listings that offer: a color map for each state with natural vegetations zones clearly marked comprehensive lists of native plants, broken down by type of plant (grasses, forbs, trees, etc.) and including both scientific and common names, with each list having been verified for completeness and accuracy by the state's natural heritage program contact names, addresses, and phone numbers for obtaining current information on invasive and noxious species to be avoided resources for more information, including contact names and addresses for local experts in each state The appendix adds definitions, bibliography, and policy citations to clarify any debates about the purpose and the direction of the use of native plants on roadsides.Roadside Use of Native Plants is a one-of-a-kind reference whose utility extends far beyond the roadside, offering a toolbox for a new aesthetic that can be applied to all kinds of public and private land. It can help lead the way to a cost-effective ecological approach to managing human-designed landscapes, and is an essential book for anyone interested in establishing or restoring native vegetation.

Flowers bring joy and beauty to our lives, from the smallest patch of daisies outside our window to the elaborate floral decorations on display at weddings, banquets, and funerals. As well as offering aesthetic benefits, they teach us much about how the world works -- each blossom is a living factory that manufactures organs and compounds ranging from the flavonoids that make a rose red to the pollen that gives us hayfever.In The Rose's Kiss, botanist Peter Bernhardt rekindles our sense of wonder at the plant life all around us. He presents a fascinating and wide ranging look at the natural history of flowers -- their forms and functions as well as their hidden interactions with the surrounding environment and the other living organisms they depend upon for survival. Using both familiar and exotic examples, he examines: flower architecture, including the wonderfully descriptive names of floral parts and their respective roles in a plant's life-cycle the secret exchange between a bud and its environment that determines blooming time and the lifespan of individual blossoms colors, scents, and other mechanisms that plants use to attract pollinators and keep them returning season after season the incredible diversity of organisms that pollinate plants -- cockroaches, flies, moths, parrots, hummingbirds, bats, and others extinct plants and their fossil blossoms, showing the evolution of flowering plants over the past 125 million years and much moreDelightfully interwoven with intriguing facts and stories from history, folklore, and mythology, The Rose's Kiss is a wonderful example of literary science writing at its best. It should hold wide appeal for nature lovers, garden enthusiasts, and anyone interested in learning more about the inner workings of the natural world.

A cultural history of a reddish, much-loved shrub, sometimes called mountain ash or dogberry.
 
Rowan is the first in-depth natural and cultural history of this much-loved plant sometimes called mountain ash or dogberry. Through myth, medicine, literature, land art, and contemporary rewilding, Oliver Southall uncovers the many meanings of this singular reddish, fruit shrub: a potent symbol of nostalgia on the one hand and of environmental activism on the other. Taking the reader on an eclectic journey across history, Rowan charts our changing relationships with nature and landscape, raising urgent questions about how we value and relate to the non-human world.