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The Sweet Breathing of Plants: Women Writing on the Green World
A bumper crop of the best writing by women on women and plants
Since prehistory, plants--as sources of food, medicine, clothing, beauty, and life itself--have been the province of women. Yet no previous book has attempted to bring together the rich literature this husbandry has inspired. This burgeoning collection amply addresses that lack, with more than three dozen selections of nonfiction and poetry.
As in Intimate Nature , their previous anthology on women and animals (edited with Deena Metzger), Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson illuminate their subject from a range of perspectives. Here are curranderas and craftswomen whose legacy of plant wisdom safeguards our connection to the green world; botanists and geneticists; and visionaries like Rachel Carson, who show us the world--and our power to protect or destroy it--in a blade of grass. Here are Zora Neale Hurston on voodoo herbs, Sharman Apt Russell on the perfume of plants, Annick Smith on huckleberries, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas on the Everglades' "river of grass," Isabel Allende on the language of flowers, Susan Orleans on "Orchid Fever," Diane Ackerman on the rain forest, and Kathleen Norris on "Dreaming of Trees." Here is an eloquent "ode to mold," a paean to mulch, an elegy for elders. Here is a book that celebrates an ancient and ongoing relationship in a new and appealing way.
Since prehistory, plants--as sources of food, medicine, clothing, beauty, and life itself--have been the province of women. Yet no previous book has attempted to bring together the rich literature this husbandry has inspired. This burgeoning collection amply addresses that lack, with more than three dozen selections of nonfiction and poetry.
As in Intimate Nature , their previous anthology on women and animals (edited with Deena Metzger), Linda Hogan and Brenda Peterson illuminate their subject from a range of perspectives. Here are curranderas and craftswomen whose legacy of plant wisdom safeguards our connection to the green world; botanists and geneticists; and visionaries like Rachel Carson, who show us the world--and our power to protect or destroy it--in a blade of grass. Here are Zora Neale Hurston on voodoo herbs, Sharman Apt Russell on the perfume of plants, Annick Smith on huckleberries, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas on the Everglades' "river of grass," Isabel Allende on the language of flowers, Susan Orleans on "Orchid Fever," Diane Ackerman on the rain forest, and Kathleen Norris on "Dreaming of Trees." Here is an eloquent "ode to mold," a paean to mulch, an elegy for elders. Here is a book that celebrates an ancient and ongoing relationship in a new and appealing way.
304 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 2001
21 people are currently reading
1881 people want to read
About the author
Linda Hogan
80 books552 followersLinda K. Hogan (born 1947 Denver) is a Native American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She is currently the Chickasaw Nation's Writer in Residence.
Linda Hogan is Chickasaw. Her father is a Chickasaw from a recognized historical family and Linda's uncle, Wesley Henderson, helped form the White Buffalo Council in Denver during the 1950s. It was to help other Indian people coming to the city because of The Relocation Act, which encouraged migration for work and other opportunities. He had a strong influence on her and she grew up relating strongly to both her Chickasaw family in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and to a mixed Indian community in the Denver area. At other times, her family traveled because of the military.
Her first university teaching position was in American Indian Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. After writing her first book, Calling Myself Home, she continued to write poetry. Her work has both a historical and political focus, but is lyrical. Her most recent books are The Book of Medicines (1993) and Rounding the Human Corners. (2008) She is also a novelist and essayist. Her work centers on the world of Native peoples, from both her own indigenous perspective and that of others. She was a full professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado and then taught the last two years in the University's Ethnic Studies Department. She currently is the Writer in Residence for her own Chickasaw Nation.
Essayist, novelist, and poet, Hogan has published works in many different backgrounds and forms. Her concentration is on environmental themes. She has acted as a consultant in bringing together Native tribal representatives and feminist themes, particularly allying them to her Native ancestry. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, expresses an indigenous understanding of the world.
She has written essays and poems on a variety of subjects, both fictional and nonfictional, biographical and from research. Hogan has also written historical novels. Her work studies the historical wrongs done to Native Americans and the American environment since the European colonization of North America.
Hogan was a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Oklahoma. She is the (inaugural) Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. In October 2011, she instructed a writing workshop through the Abiquiu Workshops in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
(from Wikipedia)
Linda Hogan is Chickasaw. Her father is a Chickasaw from a recognized historical family and Linda's uncle, Wesley Henderson, helped form the White Buffalo Council in Denver during the 1950s. It was to help other Indian people coming to the city because of The Relocation Act, which encouraged migration for work and other opportunities. He had a strong influence on her and she grew up relating strongly to both her Chickasaw family in Indian Territory (Oklahoma) and to a mixed Indian community in the Denver area. At other times, her family traveled because of the military.
Her first university teaching position was in American Indian Studies and American Studies at the University of Minnesota. After writing her first book, Calling Myself Home, she continued to write poetry. Her work has both a historical and political focus, but is lyrical. Her most recent books are The Book of Medicines (1993) and Rounding the Human Corners. (2008) She is also a novelist and essayist. Her work centers on the world of Native peoples, from both her own indigenous perspective and that of others. She was a full professor of Creative Writing at the University of Colorado and then taught the last two years in the University's Ethnic Studies Department. She currently is the Writer in Residence for her own Chickasaw Nation.
Essayist, novelist, and poet, Hogan has published works in many different backgrounds and forms. Her concentration is on environmental themes. She has acted as a consultant in bringing together Native tribal representatives and feminist themes, particularly allying them to her Native ancestry. Her work, whether fiction or non-fiction, expresses an indigenous understanding of the world.
She has written essays and poems on a variety of subjects, both fictional and nonfictional, biographical and from research. Hogan has also written historical novels. Her work studies the historical wrongs done to Native Americans and the American environment since the European colonization of North America.
Hogan was a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Oklahoma. She is the (inaugural) Writer-in-Residence for the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. In October 2011, she instructed a writing workshop through the Abiquiu Workshops in Abiquiu, New Mexico.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews
February 25, 2020
Most of these essays and poems are lovely little things, all heartfelt and gentle in some ways, often overlapping or perhaps intertwining. A bit too often, among some 40 authors, the tone lands in the didactic, which becomes very tiresome and pat.
Absolutely worthwhile just to read the section on Native Women ("The Woman I Love is a Planet; The Planet I Love is a Tree" by Paula Gunn Allen), and poems like "Index, A Mountain" by Carolyn Kizer and "The Importance of a Whale in the Field of Iris" by Pattiann Rogers.
For those who love Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkole Estés, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer Wall.
Absolutely worthwhile just to read the section on Native Women ("The Woman I Love is a Planet; The Planet I Love is a Tree" by Paula Gunn Allen), and poems like "Index, A Mountain" by Carolyn Kizer and "The Importance of a Whale in the Field of Iris" by Pattiann Rogers.
For those who love Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkole Estés, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer Wall.
September 12, 2022
Out of respect for the land and for others who may come this way, I am careful to repair the evidence of my intrusion. When I have finished, it is my time to say thank you. Today, I will leave a quiet song of long ago: Ono kah weh-weh nah, ono kah weh-weh nah…It is good to hear the language of my ancestors as it drifts across the land. Linda Yamane
I always have thought the beauty of the world is worth writing beautifully about it and for the most part, these essays hit the mark. It needed more indigenous voices, and the selection from Diane Ackerman was in no way her best; and Rachel Carson excerpt from Silent Spring seemed out of place in an anthology about the beauty of green things as it was about the eradication of them. My favorites below.
Anita Endrezze, Native American (Yaqui, Pima, Maya) and European descent
CORN MOTHER (excerpt)
Beneath Mexico city, there is a lake
Sealed tightly below concrete boulevards
And buildings of blind glass
Windows where the pigeons batter their wings
And the cleaning women press damp cloths,
Dreaming of the lake beneath the city where skulls
Have been crushed into mud and the long paths
Out of the palaces, markets where the ripe fruit rotted,
Tables where chocolate pots tipped over,
Unattended, bond ladles clinking to the floor.
Where are we? Stories above
the lake and the dead Aztecs
who were kinsmen of the Yaquis,
in some northern desert way,
and I won’t pause because history didn’t,
if you know your history: you know
that Cortes killed thousands of people,
by sword, hunger, sickness
and all their bones fell into the lake,
the water of floating gardens.
So drill into the sediment
And this is what you’ll find:
Jade flute music, bamboo combs,
A woman’s shy whisper,
Small clay statues…
Drill deeper into the core:
These are the grasses,
teosinte, Gramineae, Zea mays,
maize, corn:
20,000 years ago the seeds
Inherited the hands of women.
6500 B.C.
They sifted soil over Mexica
And gave corn a family:
Maize,
Beans,
squash.
Columbine by Elaine Scarry
The first garden I lived in was very steep. The ground rose so steadily that, if you were to enter from the front street and climb up the sequence of garden staircases to the dirt road at the top you would have ascended to the height of a fourteen-story building. This steepness – this sense of life tilted on its side-belongs to all perennials, but above all to columbine. My garden is level now, but everywhere the columbine rises and flies, floats and falls, its blossoms turning up by my face, my feet, my waist, my thighs. I am steeped in them and can measure them against every part of me. Their fluty colors- light pinks, light blues-mix with air and disappear into the sky like something that has flown too high to be identified. Each blossom looks like a shooting star itself shooting stamen stars out in front and carrying four comets behind.
Naomi Shahib Nye, Palestinian American
My great-grandfather on my mother’s side ran a drugstore in a small town in central Illinois. His specialty Mint Snowball was minty ice and ice cream mixed together that tasted like winter…like the Swiss village my great-grandfather’s parents came from. Before he died, he sold the recipe for mint syrup to someone in town for one hundred dollars. My mother had watched him make it so often she thought she could replicate it. but what did he have in the little unmarked bottles? She experimented. Once she came close. She wrote down what she did. Now she has lost the paper.
Perhaps the clue to my entire personality connects to the lost Mint Snowball. I have always felt out of step with my environment, disjointed in the modern world. The crisp flush of cities makes me weep…When I breathe in a handful of mint, even pathetic sprigs from my sunbaked Texas earth, I close my eyes. Little chips of ice on the tongue, their cool slide down. Can we follow the long river of the word “refreshment” back to its spring? Is there another land for me? Can I find lasting solace in the color green?
Linda Yamane, Ohlone artist and tribal scholar who lives in the Monterey area, the homeland of her Rumsen Ohlone ancestors
Out of respect for the land and for others who may come this way, I am careful to repair the evidence of my intrusion. When I have finished, it is my time to say thank you. Today, I will leave a quiet song of long ago: Ono kah weh-weh nah, ono kah weh-weh nah…It is good to hear the language of my ancestors as it drifts across the land. At other times, I may leave glittering bits of abalone shell, or if the weather is warm and the earth is dry, I will sprinkle water over the places I have disturbed.
Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna Pueblo, Scottish, and Lebanese descent
Our physicality- which always and everywhere includes our spirituality, mentality, emotionality, social institutions and processes- is a microform of all physicality. Each of us reflects, in our attitude toward our body and the bodies of other planetary creatures and plants, our inner attitude toward the planet. A society that believes that the body is somehow diseased, painful, sinful, or wrong, a people that spends it time trying to deny the body’s needs… is going to misunderstand the nature of its existence and other planet’s and is going to create social institutions out of these body-denying attitude that wreak destruction not only on human, plant, and other creaturely bodies, but on the body of earth herself.
Alice Walker, African American writer
THE NATURE OF THIS FLOWER IS TO BLOOM
Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.
Kathleen Norris
The immensity of land and sky in the western Dakotas allows for few trees, and I love the way that treelessness reveals the contour of the land, the way that each tree that remains seems a message bearer, a place made holy by the Gimple glory of light on trees. What would I find in my own heart, if the noise of the world were silenced? Who would I be? What is enough? Are there enough trees here? As always, it seems that the more I can distinguish my true needs from my wants, the more of a shock it is to realize how little is enough.
Brenda Peterson
Amid all the politics of timber and conservation, there is something sorely missing. Who are the trees to us? What us our connection to them on a deeper level than product? In the 500,000 years of human history throughout Old Europe, the pagans worshipped trees. The word “pagan” means simply “of the land or country.” When we recognized that our fate was directly linked to the land, trees were holy… between four and five thousand years ago in the US once stood the giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevadas. Most of these great trees are gone; but in Sequoia National Park the General Sherman tree still stands…the largest tree in the world and estimated to be 2,200 years old. [Age decreased from 3,800 at time of writing essay] 2,200 years ago, Etruscan hands crafted a tablet that became a key to the language of their civilization. Two thousand two hundred years ago, an ancient people living in present day-Colima in Mexico carved an intricate map on a massive piece of volcanic rock. It was a regional map displaying ancient settlements that exists in present-day Colima. These ancient settlements are believed to have been represented by a series of circles (carved indentions), connected by a series of lines.
During this time, the first good measurement of the distance between Earth and the Sun is made by Eratosthenes (approximate date). By studying lunar eclipses, his result is roughly 150 000 000 km. The currently accepted value is 149 597 870 691 ± 30 metres. The tree was 205 years old when Jesus of Nazareth was born, and the Common Era began, 800 years old when the Roman Empire collapsed and the Middle Ages began. 1200 when the Vikings landed in Newfoundland. Archaeological evidence indicates that the entire coast of California was occupied by humans by about 5,000-4,000 years before the present and human populations in the redwood region had reached high levels up to 10,000 in distinct tribes, the Tolowa, the Wiyot, and the Yurok.
Catherine Caulfield
It's pleasant to travel on the Rio Negro in Brazil. There are hardly an insects (because of the paucity of nutrients) and the water is placid and silky to swim in. Canoeing silently through the flooded forest is magical, like in another, charmed world. All the rivers of Europe combined support fewer than 150 species of freshwater fish, but exploring near Manaus, in the 19th century they found more than 200 species in one lake alone, Lake Hyanuary, which is only about twice the size of a tennis court. There are at least 700 species of fish in the Rio Negro alone. That is 6-7 times as many species as in all of North America. No one knows how many species there are in the Amazon Basin as a whole, but 5,000 is an often quoted estimate.
I always have thought the beauty of the world is worth writing beautifully about it and for the most part, these essays hit the mark. It needed more indigenous voices, and the selection from Diane Ackerman was in no way her best; and Rachel Carson excerpt from Silent Spring seemed out of place in an anthology about the beauty of green things as it was about the eradication of them. My favorites below.
Anita Endrezze, Native American (Yaqui, Pima, Maya) and European descent
CORN MOTHER (excerpt)
Beneath Mexico city, there is a lake
Sealed tightly below concrete boulevards
And buildings of blind glass
Windows where the pigeons batter their wings
And the cleaning women press damp cloths,
Dreaming of the lake beneath the city where skulls
Have been crushed into mud and the long paths
Out of the palaces, markets where the ripe fruit rotted,
Tables where chocolate pots tipped over,
Unattended, bond ladles clinking to the floor.
Where are we? Stories above
the lake and the dead Aztecs
who were kinsmen of the Yaquis,
in some northern desert way,
and I won’t pause because history didn’t,
if you know your history: you know
that Cortes killed thousands of people,
by sword, hunger, sickness
and all their bones fell into the lake,
the water of floating gardens.
So drill into the sediment
And this is what you’ll find:
Jade flute music, bamboo combs,
A woman’s shy whisper,
Small clay statues…
Drill deeper into the core:
These are the grasses,
teosinte, Gramineae, Zea mays,
maize, corn:
20,000 years ago the seeds
Inherited the hands of women.
6500 B.C.
They sifted soil over Mexica
And gave corn a family:
Maize,
Beans,
squash.
Columbine by Elaine Scarry
The first garden I lived in was very steep. The ground rose so steadily that, if you were to enter from the front street and climb up the sequence of garden staircases to the dirt road at the top you would have ascended to the height of a fourteen-story building. This steepness – this sense of life tilted on its side-belongs to all perennials, but above all to columbine. My garden is level now, but everywhere the columbine rises and flies, floats and falls, its blossoms turning up by my face, my feet, my waist, my thighs. I am steeped in them and can measure them against every part of me. Their fluty colors- light pinks, light blues-mix with air and disappear into the sky like something that has flown too high to be identified. Each blossom looks like a shooting star itself shooting stamen stars out in front and carrying four comets behind.
Naomi Shahib Nye, Palestinian American
My great-grandfather on my mother’s side ran a drugstore in a small town in central Illinois. His specialty Mint Snowball was minty ice and ice cream mixed together that tasted like winter…like the Swiss village my great-grandfather’s parents came from. Before he died, he sold the recipe for mint syrup to someone in town for one hundred dollars. My mother had watched him make it so often she thought she could replicate it. but what did he have in the little unmarked bottles? She experimented. Once she came close. She wrote down what she did. Now she has lost the paper.
Perhaps the clue to my entire personality connects to the lost Mint Snowball. I have always felt out of step with my environment, disjointed in the modern world. The crisp flush of cities makes me weep…When I breathe in a handful of mint, even pathetic sprigs from my sunbaked Texas earth, I close my eyes. Little chips of ice on the tongue, their cool slide down. Can we follow the long river of the word “refreshment” back to its spring? Is there another land for me? Can I find lasting solace in the color green?
Linda Yamane, Ohlone artist and tribal scholar who lives in the Monterey area, the homeland of her Rumsen Ohlone ancestors
Out of respect for the land and for others who may come this way, I am careful to repair the evidence of my intrusion. When I have finished, it is my time to say thank you. Today, I will leave a quiet song of long ago: Ono kah weh-weh nah, ono kah weh-weh nah…It is good to hear the language of my ancestors as it drifts across the land. At other times, I may leave glittering bits of abalone shell, or if the weather is warm and the earth is dry, I will sprinkle water over the places I have disturbed.
Paula Gunn Allen, of Laguna Pueblo, Scottish, and Lebanese descent
Our physicality- which always and everywhere includes our spirituality, mentality, emotionality, social institutions and processes- is a microform of all physicality. Each of us reflects, in our attitude toward our body and the bodies of other planetary creatures and plants, our inner attitude toward the planet. A society that believes that the body is somehow diseased, painful, sinful, or wrong, a people that spends it time trying to deny the body’s needs… is going to misunderstand the nature of its existence and other planet’s and is going to create social institutions out of these body-denying attitude that wreak destruction not only on human, plant, and other creaturely bodies, but on the body of earth herself.
Alice Walker, African American writer
THE NATURE OF THIS FLOWER IS TO BLOOM
Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes.
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.
Kathleen Norris
The immensity of land and sky in the western Dakotas allows for few trees, and I love the way that treelessness reveals the contour of the land, the way that each tree that remains seems a message bearer, a place made holy by the Gimple glory of light on trees. What would I find in my own heart, if the noise of the world were silenced? Who would I be? What is enough? Are there enough trees here? As always, it seems that the more I can distinguish my true needs from my wants, the more of a shock it is to realize how little is enough.
Brenda Peterson
Amid all the politics of timber and conservation, there is something sorely missing. Who are the trees to us? What us our connection to them on a deeper level than product? In the 500,000 years of human history throughout Old Europe, the pagans worshipped trees. The word “pagan” means simply “of the land or country.” When we recognized that our fate was directly linked to the land, trees were holy… between four and five thousand years ago in the US once stood the giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevadas. Most of these great trees are gone; but in Sequoia National Park the General Sherman tree still stands…the largest tree in the world and estimated to be 2,200 years old. [Age decreased from 3,800 at time of writing essay] 2,200 years ago, Etruscan hands crafted a tablet that became a key to the language of their civilization. Two thousand two hundred years ago, an ancient people living in present day-Colima in Mexico carved an intricate map on a massive piece of volcanic rock. It was a regional map displaying ancient settlements that exists in present-day Colima. These ancient settlements are believed to have been represented by a series of circles (carved indentions), connected by a series of lines.
During this time, the first good measurement of the distance between Earth and the Sun is made by Eratosthenes (approximate date). By studying lunar eclipses, his result is roughly 150 000 000 km. The currently accepted value is 149 597 870 691 ± 30 metres. The tree was 205 years old when Jesus of Nazareth was born, and the Common Era began, 800 years old when the Roman Empire collapsed and the Middle Ages began. 1200 when the Vikings landed in Newfoundland. Archaeological evidence indicates that the entire coast of California was occupied by humans by about 5,000-4,000 years before the present and human populations in the redwood region had reached high levels up to 10,000 in distinct tribes, the Tolowa, the Wiyot, and the Yurok.
Catherine Caulfield
It's pleasant to travel on the Rio Negro in Brazil. There are hardly an insects (because of the paucity of nutrients) and the water is placid and silky to swim in. Canoeing silently through the flooded forest is magical, like in another, charmed world. All the rivers of Europe combined support fewer than 150 species of freshwater fish, but exploring near Manaus, in the 19th century they found more than 200 species in one lake alone, Lake Hyanuary, which is only about twice the size of a tennis court. There are at least 700 species of fish in the Rio Negro alone. That is 6-7 times as many species as in all of North America. No one knows how many species there are in the Amazon Basin as a whole, but 5,000 is an often quoted estimate.
April 9, 2020
Really beautiful book of short stories about women and nature. It took me awhile to get through them as some were more interesting than others, but a really enjoyable read for when you want some short, digestible stories that make you think.
September 7, 2020
Great book, packed with science, information, and magic.
June 6, 2009
so much living information in this book. read the essay on orchids on the beach in cancun. next day, went exploring in the jungles of coba and found the brilliant species of orchid that does not require soil, just kickin it free style. these orchids hang from trees and rocks with their roots exposed and gather nutrients, sunlight, and moisture from the air. they simply couldn't compete with all the other roots in the ground in such dense jungles and forests. so they said, soil? who needs soil. not this plant. gg evolution, gg Nature.
December 15, 2009
I liked this book so much I bought myself a copy. There is one story that I read over and over: "La Limpia," it describes a cleansing ritual by a Mexican curandera. Every time I read it, I become very relaxed and peaceful - exactly what the cleansing ritual is supposed to make (you) feel. My second favorite story is State of Grace by Molly Peacock. It too is a very soothing story and is probably the closest description of what the meditative state feels like. All the stories (and poetry) in this book are excellent. If you want a good laugh, read "Mulch" by Linda Hasselstrom.
June 7, 2011
This collection is now ten years old, but the essays don't feel dated. Though we've made progress in terms of environmental consciousness and ecological practice since 2001, in many ways we've backslid, a fact the essays make abundantly clear. But there isn't a lot of beating the reader over the head going on here; the editors generally selected pieces that let the terrible facts speak for themselves, plus adding a healthy handful of more hopeful essays, which help us remember that the struggle isn't entirely futile.
June 29, 2009
Still have to finish this, although I had to return it to the library. For a good bedside table read (you can read one of the stories before bed), it's a lovely way to end your day reflectively and peacefully. Will finish it and post a followup review. (My problem is that I get too many books from the library and don't end up finishing them before they're due back!)
September 13, 2023
Two big things I learned from these works. One: I never knew that there was a language of flowers and plants. That which plants one gave and how those plants and flowers were received could tell you how the person who was receiving them felt about the giver. Also which flowers were in a garden would tell the mood of the person whose garden it is. Both of these with the large number of classic works I read will add depth to all the classics that I read. The second: modern white men were really really dumb back in the 50's and 60's and we haven't gotten a heck of a lot better. Back in the 50/60's men clear cut old hard wood forests to replace with nice straight loblolly pines. Clear cut and burned. Today there are maritime salvage experts getting 20K per old cherry, oak, walnut, or any other hard wood per log. SO if those meat heads from 60 years ago had just cut and then used for furniture those old growth tree's they would have made a lot more money instead of just the cash from 30 years from now pine tree's. And, today were still doing the same thing. We haven't learned a dam thing in 60 years. Rachel Carlson could write Silent Spring today and we still wouldn't get it. At the rate were going maybe God should kill us all in another flood or plague.
October 24, 2018
Here are the questions I developed for a community read presentation and open mic night using this book, October 24, 2018.
April 2, 2019
I loved this book more than I expected to. I thought it might be full of outdated feminist jargon from almost 20 years ago. It wasn't. While some pieces were written about women's experience in nature and in science, I wouldn't classify most of the book as "women's writing." It's simply very high-quality writing about the human experience with plants and nature. It's not sappy, it's not motivated. It's just grand. I'll be sharing several chapters with colleagues and students, and referencing a few in my own work.
February 1, 2025
If you are a fan of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, this compilation of essays and poems written by women about the plant world will appeal to you.
January 3, 2025
“The more I pay attention to the economic and political forces driving environmental deterioration, the less certain I am that anything I do will stop it. My heart aches for the thoughtless deaths of so many trees.” Beautiful collection of women’s writing on the green world
February 7, 2018
Fascinating anf beautifully written.
April 2, 2019
3.5 stars
April 29, 2019
I'm not usually one for essay collections but these really spoke to me! A nice range of topics and styles kept me engaged. The essays were the perfect length for reading 1 or 2 before bed.
June 19, 2019
Loved this book! Some essays stand out more than others but the whole collection is inspiring.
July 29, 2019
A collection of beautifully-written essays about our green world.
January 1, 2022
Excellent mixed perspectives on nature, feminity, and humanity.
March 12, 2025
i really enjoyed this. some very interesting essays, beautiful poems, lovely stories
May 23, 2007
As in most anthologies there are ups and downs, but more ups than downs in this one. Recommended for that somewhat limited audience of those interested in ecology/ eco-psychology from a woman's viewpoint.
March 19, 2008
This book is full of amazing stories, essays, and poems by women about their connection to the earth. Most of the pieces were quick to read, and flowery. I especially enjoyed the pieces by Susan Orlean and Isabel Allende.
Currently reading
August 24, 2009I'm going to start reading a book I bought in 2001- about "women writing on the green world" - I'm feelin' kinda in-tune with Nature and this book includes snippets of earth-focused pieces form well known nature writting enthusiasts.
June 15, 2007
I was quite taken by this book, and it made me want to hike more, and be a gardener, and lie in the grass and study bugs.
March 8, 2008
wonderful essays and poetry, written by women, all having to do with plants and our relationships to them.
May 9, 2009
still haven't read all the entries, but i enjoy picking it up from time to time. the entries vary from poems to essays to memoirs.
April 1, 2010
I really wanted to like this book. Some of the stories were good, like the one about orchids, but many of them were kind of cheesy.
June 2, 2010
This is a wonderful book. Varied in both approach, style and content it would be perfect for a beach holiday or any other time when short stories are preferrable to a novel.
November 12, 2012
I finally found this book at a bookstore and read a few excerpts. Definately on the hoped-for list!
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August 21, 2012new
Displaying 1 - 30 of 33 reviews