British journalist Wulf (co-author: This Other Eden: Seven Great
Gardens and 300 Years of English History, 2005) explores into the
personalities that spurred the evolution of the 18th-century
English garden.Renaissance and baroque gardens on the European
continent were characterized by smooth lawns, clipped hedges and
topiary in a formal, geometrical structure, writes the author. When
Thomas Fairchild, already famed for his luxuriant nursery outside
of London, developed the first hybrid in 1716, he "set in motion a
chain of events so momentous that in time no gardener would ever
think about plants in the same way again." Wulf loosely follows
these developments in smart, stylish prose without delving very
deeply. "Fairchild's mule," a cross between sweet William and a
carnation, proved that plants reproduced sexually, an incendiary
notion that Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus underscored in his
binomial nomenclature. This encouraged gardeners to meddle
empirically in their own garden plots, just as Philip Miller's
enormously accessible Gardeners Dictionary (1731), a catalogue of
all plants then in cultivation in Britain, transformed gardening
from an aristocratic preserve into the passionate pursuit of
amateurs. Profoundly influenced by Miller's dictionary, London
cloth merchant Peter Collinson began importing seeds and plantings
from the North American colonies, specifically from Pennsylvania,
with the help of Philadelphia farmer John Bartram. These floral
dispatches, much desired because their hardiness precluded the need
for hothouses, continued for more than four decades and helped make
the English garden a natural-growing perennial marvel. Another
contributor to this sea change was the treasure of botanical
specimens brought back from Captain Cook's South Seas expedition,
organized and bankrolled by celebrated botanist Joseph Banks, who
was elected president of the Royal Society in 1778. Banks' economic
use of such plants as cotton and the Indian gum tree propelled
British industry, but Wulf skirts this crucial subject. She also
gives scant attention to the idea of the English garden as an
Enlightenment ideal.An ornamental study, frustratingly lacking in
contextual cultivation. (Kirkus Reviews)
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, his new contact in the American
colonies. But it was not reels of wool or 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, introducing lustrous evergreens, fiery autumn foliage and
colourful shrubs. They were men of wealth and taste but also of
knowledge and experience like Philip Miller, author of the
bestselling Gardeners Dictionary," "and the""Swede Carl Linnaeus,
whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany as a
genteel pastime for the middle-classes; and the botanist-adventurer
Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored
the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on the greatest voyage of
discovery of modern times, Captain Cook's "Endeavou"r.
This""is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies, united
by a passion for plants - whose correspondence, collaborations and
squabbles make for a riveting human tale which is set against the
backdrop of the emerging empire, the uncharted world beyond and
London as the capital of science. From the scent of the exotic
blooms in Tahiti and Botany Bay to the gardens at Chelsea and Kew,
and from the sounds and colours of the streets of the City to the
staggering vistas of the Appalachian mountains, The Brother
Gardeners""tells the story how Britain became a nation of
gardeners.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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