The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

Description

A wonderfully readable investigation of the origins of the modern garden in 18th-century England. Popular history at its finest. One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds... Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever- Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook's Endeavour. This is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants. Set against the backdrop of the emerging empire and the uncharted world beyond, The Brother Gardeners tells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.

Andrea Wulf was born India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art and is the co-author (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden- Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, Mail on Sunday, The Garden, the Architects' Journal, and regularly reviews for several newspapers, including the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a regular contributor to BBC radio and television.

This absorbing and delightful book about 18th-century botanists stands out among histories of plant hunting ... Works superbly -- Jenny Uglow * Sunday Telegraph * Rounded, generous and exhaustively researched ... She is very adept at telling a good story, and in the history and origins of gardening she has found the perfect vehicle ... An excellent, hugely entertaining and instructive tale, and Wulf tells it very well -- Mark Cocker * The Guardian * Wondrous ... I have learned so much from her book -- Jon Snow, Channel Four News A delightful book ... Remarkably vivid -- Adrian Tinniswood Engrossing ... A gripping story, told here with grace and aplomb -- Tim Richardson * Country Life *