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Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession
Knopf
April 2009
On Sale: March 31, 2009
368 pages
ISBN: 0307270238
EAN: 9780307270238
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
This is the fascinating story of a small group of
eighteenth-century naturalists who made Britain a nation of
gardeners and the epicenter of horticultural and botanical
expertise. It’s the story of a garden revolution that began
in America. In 1733, the American farmer John Bartram dispatched two
boxes of plants and seeds from the American colonies,
addressed to the London cloth merchant Peter Collinson.
Most of these plants had never before been grown in British
soil, but in time the magnificent and colorful American
trees, evergreens, and shrubs would transform the English
landscape and garden forever. During the next forty years,
Collinson and a handful of botany enthusiasts cultivated
hundreds of American species. The Brother Gardeners follows
the lives of six of these men, whose shared passion for
plants gave rise to the English love affair with gardens.
In addition to Collinson and Bartram, who forged an
extraordinary friendship, here are Philip Miller, author of
the best-selling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swedish botanist
Carl Linnaeus, whose standardized nomenclature helped bring
botany to the middle classes; and Joseph Banks and Daniel
Solander, who explored the strange flora of Brazil, Tahiti,
New Zealand, and Australia on the greatest voyage of
discovery of their time, aboard Captain Cook’s Endeavour. From the exotic blooms in Botany Bay to the royal gardens
at Kew, from the streets of London to the vistas of the
Appalachian Mountains, The Brother Gardeners paints a vivid
portrait of an emerging world of knowledge and of gardening
as we know it today. It is a delightful and beautifully
told narrative history.
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