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THE BEAUTY BOTANIST

31st January 2016

One For The Peanut Gallery

 For better or for worse, all the musings that you’ll find here are dedicated to the Arachis hypogaea gallery (peanut, for you non-gardener’s Latin speakers). You know who you are. Those apparently futile hours of pushing, pleading, cajoling, the threats, bribes and complements (backhanded and otherwise) have paid off.

 After years of putting pen to paper (figuratively) for other people, The Beauty Botanist will be blogging for herself. I can’t promise you that the unexpurgated contents of my brain will provide you with life-changing insights, weekly thrills, or that you’ll find them even remotely interesting. What I can say is that these pages will be chock full of the subjects that occupy me: plants. Botanical beauties, their ethnobotanical roots; how to grow, use and benefit from them; and the people who live, grow and work with them. So basically it’s going to be a place to explore the ‘whys’ that plague me and the answers that enthral.

 Like any good herbarium, the specimens will be organised, but I’ve discarded Bentham, Hooker and even Chase* in a heap of unwieldy taxonomical greats. Instead, blogs will be filed in virtual boxes with labels like ‘Plant Parts’, ‘Covetousness’ and ‘People You Really Ought to Know’ on shelves like ‘Anatomy of Beauty’, ‘Biodiversity’ and ‘Life Botanical’.    

 Explore. Question. Wonder.

 *If you don’t know these guys, have a Google…they’re epic heroes of taxonomy and systematics. And just like I like’em, controversial, boat rocking gents one and all.