Host Dr. Eugene Zampieron, ND, AHG , www.drznaturally.com, interviews botanist Judith Sumner. On todays show, we will discuss Plants Go to War: A Botanical History of World War II – a look at military history from a botanical perspective, and the images say it all: From victory gardens and agriculture to rubber, coal, paper, timber, drugs, and fibers, plant products supplied the wartime materials that played key roles in victory.

Judith specializes in ethnobotany, flowering plants, plant adaptations, and garden history. She has taught extensively both at the college level and at botanical gardens, including the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and the Garden in the Woods, the foremost native plant garden of New England.

Judith graduated from Vassar College and completed graduate studies in systematic botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She studied at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and at the British Museum (Natural History) and did extensive field work in the Pacific region on the genus Pittosporum.

She has published monographic studies in the American Journal of Botany, Pollen et Spores, and Allertonia, as well as monographing two families for Flora Vitiensis Nova, the recently published flora of the Fiji Islands. Judith’s book American Household Botany won the American Horticultural Society Book Award. She was awarded the Gertrude B. Foster Award for Excellence in Herbal Literature by the Herb Society of America.

To learn more about Judith, please visit: www.judithsumner.com [includes a link to a recent lecture at Harvard on victory gardens]

To listen to the interview, click the player below. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestion, please use the comment section under this post or contact Ellen Kamhi here.