Hosted by The Plant Initiative
Free - Optional Donation Recommended
Join Prudence Gibson, the author of The Plant Thieves: Secrets of the Herbarium in a conversation about her new book with moderator Laura Pustarfi, board member of The Plant Initiative. There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.
You can buy The Plant Thieves at a discount price here (the promotion code is plantthieves30 and is active until January 29, 2024)
More about the book:
The Plant Thieves reveals remarkable stories from the National Herbarium of New South Wales — its people, its archives and its most guarded specimens.
Who gets to collect plants, name them, propagate them, extract their chemicals, sell them and use them? Whose knowledge is it? And what can the people that work with plants, just outside the law, teach us about plant care?
In The Plant Thieves, Prudence Gibson explores the secrets of the National Herbarium of New South Wales and unearths remarkable stories of plant naming wars, rediscovered lost species, First Nations agriculture, illegal drug labs and psychoactive plant knowledge.
Gibson reveals the tale of the anti-inflammatory plant that saved a herbarium manager when she was collecting in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, stories about the secret wollemi pine plantation (from one of its botanical guardians) and the truth about a beach daisy that has changed so much in 100 years that it needs to be completely reclassified. She also follows the story of the black bean Songline, a recent collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, to find the route of this important agriculture plant.
The Plant Thieves is both a lament for lost and disappearing species and a celebration of being human, of wanting to collect things and of learning more about plant life and ourselves.
More about the author:
Dr. Prudence Gibson lectures in environmental art and activism at the School of Art and Design, University of NSW, Sydney. Among many other essays, articles and papers, she is author of four books – The Rapture of Death 2009, The Pharmacy of Plants 2015, The Plant Contract 2018 and The Plant Thieves 2023. She is lead chief investigator of an Australian Research Council grant, focusing on the value of plants in the Sydney Herbarium.
There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed on Zoom with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.