The World's Most Fascinating Flora | Paperback | The Big, Bad Book of Botany</em> introduces a world of wild, wonderful, and weird plants. Some are so rare that they were once more valuable than gold. Some found in ancient mythology hold magical abilities, including the power to turn a person to stone. Others have been used by assassins to kill kings, and sorcerers to revive the dead. Here, too, is vegetation with astonishing properties to cure and heal, many of which have long since been lost with the advent of modern medicine. <br /><br />Organized alphabetically, <em>The Big, Bad Book of Botany</em> combines the latest in biological information with bizarre facts about the plant kingdom&rsquo;s oddest members, including a species that is more poisonous than a cobra and a prehistoric plant that actually walked.