As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, the author has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to the Americas, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In this book, she brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans...

"One goal drove Hosack above all others: to build the Republic's first botanical garden. Despite innumerable obstacles and near-constant resistance, Hosack triumphed when his Elgin Botanic Garden at last crowned twenty acres of Manhattan farmland by 1810. "Where others saw real estate and power, Hosack saw the landscape as a pharmacopoeia able to bring medicine into the modern age" (Eric W. Sanderson, author of Mannahatta). What remains today of America's...