With incredible grace and inspiring attention to the natural world, Robin Wall Kimmerer takes readers on a a field trip through ancient forests and backyard ponds, sacred sites and urban wastelands. Plants become powerful metaphors for healing our relationship with the natural world, and guides in the process of becoming indigenous to place ourselves.
Through a unique combination of science, Native American teachings, and memoir, she shows us in the most subtle of ways how plants are our indigenous teachers, ultimately revealing a path toward healing the rift that grows between people and nature.
As a leading researcher in the field of biology, Robin Wall Kimmerer understands the delicate state of our world. But as an active member of the Potawatomi nation, she senses and relates to the world through a way of knowing far older than any science.
In Braiding Sweetgrass, she intertwines these two modes of awareness--the analytic and the emotional, the scientific and the cultural. Her writing crosses boundaries between indigenous and dominant culture, between science and literature, between matter and spirit, bringing readers back into conversation with all that is green and growing--a universe that never stopped speaking to us, even if we neglected to listen.
"This book changed my life. I have been a gardener most of my life, and have felt a connection to nature even as a city dweller. But reading this book has deepened my experience of the natural world into a much more spiritual level unlike any other book I have read previously. The science is fascinating and understandable; the wisdom is awe-inspiring. It is a book that I open and read whenever I need to plant my feet on the ground again. I can't recommend this book more highly. " --Online review.
"Profoundly subversive. Robin Kimmerer writes a love story and along the way educates readers about the relationship of people to the land. A relationship that our present culture is abusing. My knowledge was deepened and my reverence for nature was awakened while reading the book." --Online review.
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions
of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen
Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are
our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings
these two lenses of knowledge together to take us on “a journey that is
every bit as mythic as it is scientific, as sacred as it is historical,
as clever as it is wise” (Elizabeth Gilbert).
Please note: the color graphic images we feature here, which highlight quotes from this book are not included in the book. The book is text, which inspires such imagery.