I'm looking (again) for some historical background for a poem I'm working on. It is based off of a real event ( Read more... )

EDIT: So far I've been searching "red rose varieties" (and other arrangements of those words), which led me to a site containing information on the oldest varieties of hybrid tea roses, but I'm not sure what to narrow it down to specifically to find "red and white roses a very wealthy person would have growing outside his mansion".  As for ( Read more... )

Hi, I'm working on a book that features aliens from a planet that orbits a red dwarf star. One of the theories I've read through research is that the plants on this planet would be black and dark purple. One of the sites that I read explained it this way:

As indicated in NASA studies announced in 2007, plants evolved under dim red dwarf suns or in ( Read more... )

This probably sounds like a strange question to ask, but I need to know some of the plants that commonly grow in fallow / abandoned fields in farms near the coastal / lowcountry region of South Carolina. (In case it's necessary, the story takes place today, about 20 miles north of Charleston) I've tried Googling for this extensively, as well as ( Read more... )

Setting: Not exactly Earth, but a region with great similarities to the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains. Time period is indeterminate, but pre modern medicine ( Read more... )

My character is a female warrior in yet another pseudo Medieval European fantasy land. She's brewing herself a sort of good luck tea as a pre-battle ritual. What I need are the herbs she might use. They have to be herbs that will bring her courage, heroism, strength, and overall "manliness" (gender roles, gender perceptions, and the blurring ( Read more... )

I'm writing a sci-fi story about kids bred in enclosed underground environments, raised by robots without any access to outside society. A couple of them grow a tree from fruit seeds taken from their food, via artificial bright lighting in a garden. The tree should be taller than it is wide, with branches sturdy enough for a young kid to climb, and ( Read more... )

My story takes place in a parallel universe, similar to the modern day. I've looked in Wikipedia for poisonous mushrooms, done a Google search on slow-acting poisons, plant toxins and paralytic toxins, but the ones I've found are a bit too effective. On my search I found that what I want can be most likely achieved by combining two poisonsFirst, I ( Read more... )

I can't find a firm answer to this question, although I've seen sites that suggest that it's possible, in that they mention Central America. Terms searched include ayahuasca, ayahuasca vine, does ayahuasca grow in Mexico, ayahuasca range, etc etc. There are lots of sites extolling its chemical properties, but not so much in the way of botany. ( Read more... )

( Cut for talk of suicide )