It S Just A Plant

A beautifully illustrated picture book that gives parents a way to discuss marijuana with children without encouraging them to use it. "It's Just a Plant follows the journey of a young girl named Jackie, who becomes curious about cannabis after she discovers her parents smoking a joint in their bedroom. Jackie's education about marijuana includes visits to several members of her community, including a farmer who cultivates the plant and a doctor who advises that cannabis should only be used by adults...Cortés' book offers an opportunity for parents to discuss many aspects of the conversation around marijuana." --High Times "Part of a growing category of books that attempt to explain difficult and complex topics to children, simply. Whether you're looking at Death Is Stupid, by Anastasia Higginbotham, or A is for Activist, by Innosanto Nagara, children's fiction is much less likely to shy away from topics that were previously reserved for those considered to be 'adults,' or to cloud those topics in euphemisms." --Literary Hub, selected by Molly Odintz for LitHub Recommends "As controversial as the topic may seem for a kids' book, [Cortés is]...right. It's crucial for parents to be open and educate their kids about marijuana (and any other drugs, really) in a factual, non-judgmental way--especially if parents are using themselves. After all, keeping drugs' existence a mystery is only going to spark curious kids' interests further." --SheKnows "With more home schooling taking place due to COVID-19, Ricardo Cortés hopes It's Just a Plant can spark family-friendly cannabis education." --Mugglehead "We've all heard the sentiment that the more we keep our kids away from something and paint it as 'dangerous' or 'bad,' the more likely they are to be interested in whatever that is. The same can be said for conversations like his--if we avoid or brush off any questions relating to marijuana for our kids, they're going to get the information from somewhere and it just feels a whole lot safer knowing they're getting the right information from you--or a book like this." --Fatherly "Absolutely 'kid friendly' in tone, organization and presentation, It's Just a Plant: A Children's Story about Marijuana is especially recommended for family, preschool, elementary school, and community library...collections." --Midwest Book Review It's Just a Plant is a children's book that follows the journey of a young girl as she learns about the marijuana plant from a cast of characters including her parents, a local farmer, a doctor, and a police officer. Marijuana can be hard to talk about. Many parents have tried it, millions use it, and most feel awkward about disclosing such histories (often ducking the question), for fear that telling kids the truth might encourage them to experiment too. Meanwhile, the "drug facts" children learn in school can be more frightening than educational, blaming pot for everything from teenage pregnancy to terrorism. A child's first awareness of drugs should come from a better source. It's Just a Plant is a story for parents who want to discuss the complexities of pot with their kids in a thoughtful, fact-oriented manner. The book also features an afterword by Marsha Rosenbaum, PhD, founder of the Safety First Project for drug education and director emerita of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, the nation's leading organization working to end the war on drugs.

The creator of Instagram’s House Plant Journal mixes love with scientific logic in this beautifully photographed guide for indoor gardeners. For indoor gardeners everywhere, Darryl Cheng offers a new way to grow healthy house plants. He teaches the art of understanding a plant’s needs and giving it a home with the right balance of light, water, and nutrients. With this book, indoor gardeners can be less a passive follower of rules for the care of each species and much more the confident, active grower, relying on observation and insight. And in the process, the plant owner becomes a plant lover, bonded to these beautiful living things by a simple love and appreciation of nature. The New Plant Parent covers all of the basics of growing house plants, from finding the right light, to everyday care like watering and fertilizing, to containers, to recommended species. Cheng’s friendly tone, personal stories, and accessible photographs fill his book with the same generous spirit that has made @houseplantjournal, his Instagram account, a popular source of advice and inspiration for over half a million indoor gardeners.

"INFORMATIVE AND ORIGINAL" Guardian, 'This month's best paperbacks' We've become used to thinking of plants as things for us to use: as food, tools, resources, or just as an attractive background to our own lives. But it's time to change our minds. New research shows that plants can think, plan - and may even have memories. We share our planet with beings whose potential we have only glimpsed. Featuring the writing of Robin Wall Kimmerer, Susie Orbach and Merlin Sheldrake, This Book is a Plant will be your handbook to the new reality: showing you a pathway to completely reimagine your relationship with a different kind of natural world. Delve into a world of moss and fungi: Sheila Watt-Cloutier transports us to the Arctic spring, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan discovers the pleasures of painting trees, and Rebecca Tamás puts roots down through earth and soil. This Book is a Plant is made from paper: it was once part of a tree. But it's also a seed: the first shoots of a radical new way of seeing the world around you. "AN ECLECTIC ANTHOLOGY GUARANTEED TO MAKE THE HEARTS OF EARTH LOVERS BEAT FASTER" Metro

The bestselling authors of Urban Jungle delve into the many ways that nurturing plants helps nurture the soul This new book by the authors of the bestselling Urban Jungle addresses the life-changing magic of living with and caring for plants. Aimed at a wider audience than typical houseplant books, each chapter combines easily digestible plant knowledge, style guidance via real home interiors, and inspiring advice for using plants to increase energy, creativity, and well-being and to attract love and prosperity. Also included: real-world @urbanjungleblog followers’ FAQs; a section on plants and pets; and plant care for the different stages of a houseplant’s life. The focus is on using plants to raise the positive energy of every room in the house and to live happily ever after with plants.

"A guide to selecting and growing plants for your home, including a plant profile quiz"--

Is that a weed? This question, asked by anyone who has ever gardened or mowed a lawn, does not have an easy answer. After all, a weed, as suburban mother and professional weed scientist Nancy Gift reminds readers, is simply a plant out of place. In A Weed by Any Other Name, Gift offers a personal, unapologetic defense of clovers, dandelions, plantains, and more, chronicling her experience with these "enemy" plants season by season. Rather than falling prey to pressures to achieve the perfect lawn and garden, Gift elucidates the many reasons to embrace an unconventional, weedy yard. She celebrates the spots of wildness that crop up in various corners of suburbia, redeeming many a plant's reputation by expounding on its positive qualities. She includes recipes for dandelion wine and garlic mustard pesto as well as sketches that show the natural beauty of flowers such as the morning glory, classified by the USDA as an invasive and noxious weed. Although she is an advocate of weeds, Gift admits that some plants do require eradication-she happily digs out multiflora rose and resorts to chemical warfare on poison ivy. But she also demonstrates that weeds often carry a message for us about the land and our treatment of it, if we are willing to listen.

Aimed at a new generation of indoor gardening enthusiasts, this book is a perfect guide for anyone keen to see their plant offspring thrive. Plants have found popularity in the small home, and are being proclaimed the new stars of Instagram. This attractive little book is ideal for the novice "plant parent," providing tips on how to choose plants, and above all how to care for them and keep them thriving. Indoor-plant experts and Instagrammers Erin Harding and Morgan Doane bring the subject to life alongside their beautiful photographs of happy plants in the home.

The instant New York Times bestseller | A Washington Post Notable Book | One of NPR's Best Books of the Year “Expert storytelling . . . [Pollan] masterfully elevates a series of big questions about drugs, plants and humans that are likely to leave readers thinking in new ways.” —New York Times Book Review From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs, and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos. Of all the things humans rely on plants for—sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber—surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime? In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs—opium, caffeine, and mescaline—and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings? In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively—as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.