From the Book - Paperback ed.
Paleozoic plants and a ferny childhood
First view of Oaxaca city
A short history of tobacco
Santo Domingo and its garden of triffids
Chilies, spices, and chocolate
The last of the wild avocados
The marketplace, from sapotes to fluorescent minerals
Setting out for the Llano de las Flores
Morning glory and other New World hallucinogens
A first meeting with Boone
Legumes, alders, and nitrogen-fixing
Beautiful and dangerous bracken
Early Mesoamerican settlement
The euphonious sulfides of arsenic
Two-dimensional physicists
The mineral springs and petrified falls
The strange death of Georgi Markov
Plants of the Oaxaca Valley
Luis's history of Mexico after the Conquest
The civilization of Monte Albán
An encounter with the police
Passionflowers and hummingbirds
Giant horsetails and tales of Calamites
A museum and library of pre-Hispanic artifacts
The paradoxes of pre-Columbian cultures
A final ferning expedition.