52 FLOWERS THAT SHOOK MY WORLD
A Radical Return to Earth
Charlotte Du Cann
The story of an inquiry, a sea change, a path of flowers, a return journey …
In 1991 Charlotte Du Cann leaves a fashionable London life and goes on the road. Her decision to break free has been influenced by the appearance of a flower, known as Mexican wormseed. Later she begins an exploration into the language of plants that changes her direction – and the territory she travels through – completely. The plants come in dreams, in visions, in medicine ways and myths, in the legacy of writers, and, as she follows their track, crossing the thorny deserts of Arizona and the flowering wastelands of England, they call her back to the heartland, back to the shore where the sea-kale grows, to restore a world where nature and beauty are at the centre of life. And most of all they call her to return to herself, someone who loved to be light and at liberty, an independent female being at home on the earth. From the Oxford Botanical Garden to the streets of Mexico City, from encounters with power plants and people, to history and ancestral trees, this is the story of a search for a reconnection with nature and human liberation that speaks urgently of the future.
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer and community activist working in grassroots communications for the Transition Network and the Dark Mountain Project. She was born in London in 1956, and worked during the 1980s as a lifestyle journalist, specialising in food, fashion and design. After travelling for ten years, mostly in the Americas, she settled in Suffolk in 2002 to write a sequence of books about reconnecting with the earth. She has published five works of nonfiction, ranging from a collection of essays about food, Offal and the New Brutalism (Heinemann), to the travelogue Reality Is the Bug That Bit Me in the Galapagos (Flamingo). She edits several collaborative blogs, ‘This Low Carbon Life’, ‘The Social Reporters Project’ and the ‘OneWorldColumn’, and is currently working on a low-carbon cookbook, One Planet Community Kitchen and a prequel to 52 Flowers, The Earth Dreaming Bank.
You can find a selection of Charlotte's writings at http://charlotteducann.blogspot.com.
Charlotte also is a columnist for EarthLines Magazine: www.earthlines.org.uk
