The artistic view of this topic comes to us through the eyes of Frederic Amat (Barcelona, 1952). Through his work, done exclusively for Mètode, this artist opens the door to each of the following articles. On this occasion, we also have the literary vision of the writer Gaspar Jaén Urban (Elx, 1952), who takes us back to his childhood, in which plants played an important role. Some texts are accompanied by the writer’s own watercolours. / Gaspar Jaén Urban. Six Garden Plants, 2011. Watercolour and Indian ink, 51×37,5 cm.
Ethnobotany, the study of relationships between human societies and plants, is a discipline at the crossroads between natural sciences and social sciences. Such interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity breaches a purely scientific paradigm to bring researchers together from fields as diverse as anthropology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, botany and ecology. More or less closely, these researchers collaborate within the same topic area in their endeavour to understand how humans perceive, understand and manage the plant world.
In this monograph, we give several examples of approaches to the study of plants, their popular uses and other information. Herein, we explore ethnofloristic studies, with social anthropological analyses, inclined towards conservation, as well as looking at medicinal plants, plants used for food, or simply decorative protagonists. We also discuss research carried out in different Catalan-speaking regions, as well as in other Iberian and European geographical and cultural areas.
