commonplacebook-1816

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The Plant Hunter’s Atlas by Ambra Edwards

Twice, tree species thought long extinct have been rediscovered in a limited area and sold commercially to ensure its continued survival: the Wollemi Pine (Australia) and the Dawn Redwood (China).

The saffron crocus has been domesticated longer than human record. It’s been found in 50,000-year-old cave art paint and has lost the ability to perpetuate itself and depends on human intervention. It’s been long lauded as an antidepressant.

Francis Masson brought a cycad from South Africa to England in the late 1700s, where it still lives in Kew Gardens. It may be the oldest potted plant still living.

There are 11,300 native plants in Madagascar. 1 in 10 is an orchid.

[commonplacebook-1816]

“So you’d needn’t always choose to read what’s the most edifying, or professionally useful, or most enthusiastically endorsed by the arbiters of culture. Sometimes it’s OK just to read what seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring, or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it may do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.”

Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

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when i was reading the book entangled life which is about fungi and the author merlin sheldrake said that once he got his first author copies he was going to dampen the pages and use them to grow oyster mushrooms and yeast and then use the yeast to brew beer and then drink the beer with the mushrooms to complete the cycle of fungal knowledge. i was like really and truly this guy gets it

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If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness. I would be a fox, or a tree full of waving branches. I wouldn't mind being a rose in a field full of roses.

"Roses, Late Summer" by Mary Oliver

[commonplacebook-1816]

Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History by Florence Williams

Why do we have breasts anyway?

Anthropologist Gillian Bentley developed the "flat face" theory – "in order for newborns to get through our unusually narrow bipedal hips, their faces need to be flat. Flat faces and flat chests don't work well together." There's the camel theory, that breasts are fat deposits, which render a woman's fertility and lactation more resilient to a bout of famine. There's a theory about the specific suckling technique the breast engenders, which develops the muscles needed for speech. 

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/13/breasts-florence-williams-review

From attraction to boob jobs to breastfeeding to cancer (to that one guy who tasted seal milk and described it as "fishy"), this is a book you'll never forget.

[commonplacebook-1816]

The new philosophers decided that there were only two sexes, fixed and unchanging, completely opposite, male and female, normal and other. They saw this simple binary model because they favored it. They found it because they looked for it, because it fitted their ideas of male and female status. When they saw behaviors or nature that did not support a rigid binary model, they explained them away. The changing sex of the developing fetus, the presence of all the sex organs in early development was ignored. Two sexes, completely opposite, were never a genuine observation, supported by all the other evidence, but an intellectual fashion, in all modernizing Europe thought, invented to explain and justify sexual inequality.

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History by Philippa Gregory

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The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow

the two fundamental truths of historical and contemporary mankind:

we were just as smart then as we are now

we are just as stupid now as we were then

[commonplacebook-1816]

May

What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die. I knelt on the road and stared. Its head was wedge-shaped and fell back to the unexpected slimness of neck. The body itself was thick, tense, electric. Clearly this wasn’t black snake looking down from the limbs of a tree, or green snake, or the garter, whizzing over the rocks. Where these had, oh, such shyness, this one had none. When I moved a little, it turned and clamped its eyes on mine; then it jerked toward me. I jumped back and watched as it flowed on across the road and down into the dark. My heart was pounding. I stood a while, listening to the small sounds of the woods and looking at the stars. After excitement we are so restful. When the thumb of fear lifts, we are so alive.

— Mary Oliver, "May"

New and Selected Poems, Volume 2

Beacon Press, Boston, 1992

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What will ambition do for me that the fox, appearing suddenly at the top of the field, her eyes sharp and confident as she stared into mine, has not already done?

from "Am I Not Among the Early Risers" by Mary Oliver

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When I Say I Forgive You, Know This

By Brenna Twohy

I did not bury the hatchet.

I have the hatchet in my hands.

I am building myself a new house.

[commonplacebook-1816]

Jane Austen game!

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"It was only after the agricultural revolution, then still more after the rise of cities, that this 'happy' condition came to an end, ushering in civilization and the state, which also meant the appearance of written literature, science, and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions, and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms."

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber

(This whole section is tongue-in-cheek. Graeber says that there are some ways we've viewed traditionally viewed our own history, and that those ways aren't necessarily true or helpful.)

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"Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?"

Mary Oliver

"Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches"

West Wind

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Borderline by Mishell Baker

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We breathe 7-8 trees worth of oxygen per year!

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The Lost Future of Pepperharrow

Natasha Pulley

Sequel to The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

“Thaniel wondered if real geisha painted themselves white so that it was harder to see how angry they must be all the time.”

On telephones: “Thaniel couldn't think of anything less civilised than making a terrible noise at somebody until they answered you.”