A Curious History of Vegetables: Aphrodisiacal and Healing Properties, Folk Tales, Garden Tips, and Recipes

Featuring gardening tips, recipes, and beautiful full-color pencil drawings of each vegetable, this book for farm-to-fork aficionados and gardeners with an esoteric bent explores the secret history of 48 well known and rare vegetables, examining their symbolism, astrological connections, healing properties, and overall character.

A fascinating introduction to vegetable gardening and cooking, A Curious History of Vegetables sets horticulture in its historical, cultural, and cosmological contexts. The author offers his deep understanding of the theory of biodynamic gardening and useful tips on light and warmth, ground covers, composts, crop rotation and weeds. Woven in with folk tales and stories from history, each entry also includes delicious historical recipes for each vegetable.

Wolf D. Storl, PhD, is an ethnobotanist and the author of some two dozen books on herbalism, alternative medicine, ethnobotany, and shamanism. Born in Saxony, Germany, he received his PhD in ethnology from the University of Berne, Switzerland. His early post-doctorate career includes research in a Swiss biodynamic farming community, teaching anthropology and organic gardening at Rogue College in Oregon, participant-observer research at a traditional Swiss farm, and two years in India as a visiting scholar at the Benares Hindu University. Always interested in local gardening practices in his travels around the world, 25 years ago Dr. Storl was able to put his learning to the test when he and his family moved to a mountain farmstead in southern Germany. There he maintains a year-round vegetable garden and continues to teach, also appearing on television in the U.S. and many countries in Europe as a spokesman for natural horticulture.