Unusual Plants

by Heinz Kohler

About 150 years ago, the newly formed Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company decided to advertise its product by rewarding loyal customers with gifts of colorful and ever so beautiful picture cards. Each card was a work of art; no wonder the images and their associated commentary captivated and mesmerized people. Before long, thousands of these cards were circulating and new editions were eagerly awaited. As a group, they told fascinating stories about every conceivable aspect of life on earth and similar to what the Internet might do in our time, came to embody the sum total of human knowledge. Collectors could travel the globe, meet people from any country on earth, and learn about their customs. They visited lost civilizations, too, or viewed natural and man-made wonders around the globe. They studied plants and animals or followed the evolution of commerce and transport. They learned about geography, history, or natural science and discovered the secrets of agriculture, forestry, and fishing. They traced the origins of new inventions that were transforming industry and life in general. They met up with music and literature, great art and architecture, famous men and women of all ages, and, most importantly for children no doubt, with giants and dwarfs, elves and gnomes, riddles and fairy tales! In hindsight, strange as it may sound, the company’s most important contribution, perhaps, was not to the kitchens of the world, but to the education of millions of people of all ages who could not go to school or afford books! The author’s grandmother was one of them and, many years later, when he was a child, she used her large collection of Liebig cards, as one would the modern-day Internet, to satisfy his urge to find out everything about the big wide world. This book is the third of a series that resurrects grandmother’s magical Internet and seeks to pass on the joy that it brought. Book 3 of the SURFING A MAGICAL INTERNET series presents over 100 pictures along with fascinating stories about all sorts of unusual plants that excited people during my grandmother’s youth and are bound to do the same for us. We meet medicinal plants that may or may not heal people and others that would definitely poison them. We learn of plants that are the source of beautiful paints and dyes and of others that have long been celebrated in works of art. We study spice plants and carnivorous plants and find out how some plants came to be sacred plants. We visit night-blooming plants and nightshade plants and marvel at the world’s most remarkable trees. We meet up with exotic food plants and encounter others still that manage to prosper in the driest of deserts or on the highest of mountains. And we come across intriguing stories about reeds and cane plants and all sorts of useful “industrial” plants that have supported a great variety of human endeavors for millennia. There are amazing stories associated with all of these.

296 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 9, 2014

About the author

HEINZ KOHLER was born in Berlin, Germany, where he grew up before and during World War II. By the war's end, he found himself in rural East Germany and spent years watching the Nazi tyranny give way to a Communist one. He made it to West Berlin before the Wall went up and came to the United States in the late 1950s. Since 1961, he was associated with Amherst College, Massachusetts, where he became the Willard Long Thorp Professor of Economics, taught Economics as well as Statistics and published numerous textbooks on both subjects. His most recent books include the series SURFING A MAGICAL INTERNET, Book 1: Extraordinary Birds, Book 2: Brainteasers, Book 3: Unusual Plants, Book 4: Remarkable Animals, Book 5: Wonders of the World, Book 6: The World's Greatest Inventions, Book 7: Exploring Northern Europe, Book 8: Exploring Western Europe, Book 9: Exploring Southwestern Europe, Book 10: Exploring Central Europe, Book 11: Exploring Africa, Book 12: Exploring Southeastern Europe, Book 13: Exploring Russia and Central Asia, Book 14: Exploring Western Asia, Book 15: Exploring Southern Asia, Book 16: Exploring Eastern Asia, Book 17: Exploring Australia and Oceania, Book 18: Exploring North America, and Book 19: exploring Central America--all of which introduce the Internet equivalent of the late 1800s, CAUTION: SNAKE OIL! which shows how statistical thinking can help us expose misinformation about our health, and MY NAME WAS FIVE, a memoir of World War II.