Gareth Richards – författare

RHS Weeds gathers together 50 untamed and beautifully wild plant species, illustrated with exquisite botanical images from the Royal Horticultural Society's archives. Their natural untamed beauty, ability to thrive under challenging conditions, and the attraction of growing species native to their surroundings have all taken weeds from undesirable to covetable. These subversive species no longer need to be seen as 'plants out of place'. In the modern garden, where harmony with nature is key, weeds are finally getting their moment in the sun.RHS Weeds highlights the delicate charms of some of the most fascinating vagabond plants around. Beautiful botanical illustrations from the Royal Horticultural Society's collections and captivating profiles by RHS author Gareth Richards provide key information for the modern gardener on the characteristics, usefulness and cultivation of 50 unsung heroes of the plant world.

This beautifully designed RHS Pocket Guide contains all you need you identify the wildflowers around you and care for them in your garden. Whether you're out gathering wild garlic and sweet cicely or making space for foxgloves and honeysuckle in your garden, this guide offers year-round guidance and inspiration for every nature-lover. The perfect companion on a country walk or sunny garden seat, it contains 50 charmingly illustrated profiles of common British varieties and is packed with RHS-approved advice on identifying, planting and enjoying wildflowers all year round. Part-practical manual and part-celebration of wildflowers, this delightful pocket-sized treasure trove is the ideal gift for any nature lover.

This book seeks to break new ground, both empirically and conceptually, in examining discourses of identity formation and the agency of critical social practices in Malaysia. Taking an inclusive cultural studies perspective, it questions the ideological narrative of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ that dominates explanations of conflicts and cleavages in the Malaysian context. The contributions are organised in three broad themes. ‘Identities in Contestation: Borders, Complexities and Hybridities’ takes a range of empirical studies—literary translation, religion, gender, ethnicity, indigeneity and sexual orientation—to break down preconceived notions of fixed identities. This then opens up an examination of ‘Identities and Movements: Agency and Alternative Discourses’, in which contributors deal with counter-hegemonic social movements—of anti-racism, young people, environmentalism and independent publishing—that explicitly seek to open up greater critical, democratic space within the Malaysian polity. The third section, ‘Identities and Narratives: Culture and the Media’, then provides a close textual reading of some exemplars of new cultural and media practices found in oral testimonies, popular music, film, radio programming and storytelling who have consciously created bodies of work that question the dominant national narrative. This book is a valuable interdisciplinary work for advanced students and researchers interested in representations of identity and nationhood in Malaysia, and for those with wider interests in the fields of critical cultural studies and discourse analysis.“Here is a fresh, startling book to aid the task of unbinding the straitjackets of ‘Malay’, ‘Chinese’ and ‘Indian’, with which colonialism bound Malaysia’s plural inheritance, and on which the postcolonial state continues to rely. In it, a panoply of unlikely identities—Bajau liminality, Kelabit philosophy, Islamic feminism, refugee hybridity and more—finds expression and offers hope for liberation”. Rachel Leow, University of Cambridge“This book shakes the foundations of race thinking in Malaysian studies by expanding the range of cases, perspectives and outcomes of identity. It offers students of Malaysia an examination of identity and agency that is expansive, critical and engaging, and its interdisciplinary depth brings Malaysian studies into conversation with scholarship across the world”.Sumit Mandal, University of Nottingham Malaysia“This is a much-needed work that helps us to take apart the colonial inherited categories of race which informed the notion of the plural society, the idea of plurality without multiculturalism. It complicates the picture of identity by bringing in religion, gender, indigeneity and sexual orientation, and helps us to imagine what a truly multiculturalist Malaysia might look like”.Syed Farid Alatas, National University of Singapore