Botany Lessons

This is the story of a philosophy drop-out who winds up as an anthropologist asking diverse people across the world what plants can teach us about life. Part travel memoir, part ethnography, part philosophical pondering, the essays in this work of creative non-fiction consider lessons in hope with maize (Zea mays) and First Nations farmers in the Sonoran desert, belonging with China apples (Ziziphus mauritiana Lam) and Chinese-Afghan-Indigenous descendents in outback Australia, non-attachment with bodhi trees (Ficus religiosa) and monks in Cambodia, healing with cycads (Cycas armstrongii) and Indigenous Elders in the Tiwi Islands, and much more.