Green-0276 

Set offshore at the far fringe of Europe, its historic subsistence rural culture so long remote from industrial development or bourgeois mores, Ireland should offer an encyclopedic heritage of the use of wild plants as food and medicine, for everyday utility or symbolic ritual. ... How this knowledge was lost or rejected after the Famine and in the drive for modernity and prosperity is just one thread of Peter Wyse Jackson s epic exploration of Ireland s ethnobotanical heritage. ... In an increasingly synthetic and digital world, however, there remains, or has revived, an intuitive need for reconnection with plants. From the greener reaches of the internet to the new allotments and communal city gardens of Dublin even, indeed, the current fascination with culinary herbs and spices this renewal of curiosity adds much value to this book, alongside its obvious beauty and great ethnobotanical worth. More than half of the 925 native plants of this island have been useful to its people, but nowhere, until now, have their stories been gathered together so systematically, both for Irish readers and the wider cultural and scientific audience. Michael Viney Author and Columnist for The Irish Times - from Amzon