Pantagruelion

Shanghai Daily: “ZHENG Dexun shows off a humanshaped heshouwu, or Chinese knotweed, yesterday in Langzhong in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. The herb, weighing 5.8 kilograms and standing 62 centimeters high, resembles a naked child. Zheng, 63, a farmer in Datianba Village, discovered the oddity five days ago while digging for the herb, which is used as a tonic for the kidneys and to treat weak bones and hair loss.”

Cruydeboek

BibliOdyssey

Galleria Carnivora: A museum of colour photographs of carnivorous plants.

iSpecies: a test of E. O. Wilson’s idea of a web page for each species.

U.S. National Argicultural Library: William Curtis (1746-1799) was a trained pharmacist living in London whose greater interest was the study of flora and insects. He maintained a large garden where he grew beautiful exotic plants, and began publishing the Curtis Botanical Magazine in 1787. This digital presentation represents 1048 plates and 1456 related pages of text from the first 26 volumes.

British Library Try the link for Classic of Botanical Illustration by Elizabeth Blackwell

Science: The Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe, the first full modern survey of the role of plants in Europe’s religions, traditions, and medicine, was published in 2003. Previously, information on the subject has been scattered and lacking in botanical rigor, says ethnobotanist Marcel De Cleene of the University of Ghent in Belgium. De Cleene and colleague Marie Claire Lejeune spent 20 years filling the gap. The 1600-page Compendium contains information collected from thousands of texts dating to ancient Roman and Greek times.

The Guardian — April 5, 2004.  
Provided that a duchess can see eye-to-eye with the Home Office on growing cannabis, strychnine and cocaine, Britain is about to get the most venomous and hallucinogenic garden it has ever seen. Harking back to medieval times, but with a toxic arsenal that a witch or apothecary could only dream of, the project includes shrubs and creepers so potentially nasty that the designers have suggested growing some of them in cages.

Library of Congress —
A Science Reference Section Webliography.