CONTENTS:

Preface

1. Friday
Flying to Mexico... Paleozoic plants and a ferny childhood... A society of amateurs

2. Saturday
First view of Oaxaca city... A short history of tobacco... Santo Domingo and its garden oftriffids... Chilies, spices, and chocolate... The last of the wild avocados... The marketplace, form sapotes to fluorecent minerals

3. Sunday
Setting out for the Llano de las Flores... Life cycle of ferns... Morning glory and other new world hallucinogens... A first meeting with boone... Ferning... Legumes, alders, and nitrogen-fixing... Beautiful and dangerous bracken... Sudden altitude sickness

4. Monday
The Tule tree... Early mesoamerican settlement... The ruins of yagul... Resurrection ferns... The euphonious sulfides of arsenic

5. Tuesday
A day by myself... The zócalo... Two-dimensional physicists... A fusion of cultures

6. Wednesday
The mineral springs and petrified falls... A show-and-tell back at the hotel... Trasures from the atlantic slope... The strange death of Georgi Markov... Botanical couples... A strange "symptom," joy

7. Thursday
Plants of the Oaxaca Valley... Luis's history of México after the conquest... A religious proccession... Mitla and its intricate adobe construction... Matatlán, maguey and mescal... Maguey worms and locusts... The gentle capybara... Pottery... Weaving and carmine cochineal

8. Friday
A lunar eclipse... The civilization of Monte Albán... Pre-colombian astronomy and religion... The ball game... Rubber... The bumble but pepremptory call of cryptogamic botany

9. Saturday
Divine mathematics... An encounter whith the police... Boone's casita... Passionflowers and bummimgbirds... Giant borsetails and tales of calimites... Boone's corn... A rare endemic llavea.. A museum and library of pre-hispanic artifacts... The paradoxes of pre-Columbian cultures

10. Sunday
A final ferning expedition... Dogs and a picnic by the ford... Sunset... Farwell at dawn