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Orchids, the epitome of floral beauty, have long inspired poetry,
adventure, art and scientific discovery. In Orchid Muse, historian
and home orchid grower Erica Hannickel brings together fascinating
tales of the orchid-smitten throughout history, along with tips on
growing the exotic blooms at the centre of each account. Consider,
for instance, Empress Eugenie and Queen Victoria, the two most
powerful women in nineteenth-century Europe, who shared a passion
for Coelogyne cristata. John Roebling, builder of the Brooklyn
Bridge, and Raymond Burr, the actor famed for playing Perry Mason,
cultivated thousands of orchids, introducing captivating new and
unusual species. Transporting the reader from hazardous Amazonian
journeys to a seedy dime museum in Gilded Age New York's
Tenderloin, from the glories of the palace gardens of Chinese
Empress Cixi to the island of Bourbon, where the vanilla orchid
thrives, Orchid Muse spans the world, exploring our enduring
fascination with these exquisite flowers.
The lush, sun-drenched vineyards of California evoke a romantic,
agrarian image of winemaking, though in reality the industry
reflects American agribusiness at its most successful. Nonetheless,
as author Erica Hannickel shows, this fantasy is deeply rooted in
the history of grape cultivation in America. "Empire of Vines"
traces the development of wine culture as grape growing expanded
from New York to the Midwest before gaining ascendancy in
California--a progression that illustrates viticulture's centrality
to the nineteenth-century American projects of national expansion
and the formation of a national culture."Empire of Vines" details
the ways would-be gentleman farmers, ambitious speculators,
horticulturalists, and writers of all kinds deployed the animating
myths of American wine culture, including the classical myth of
Bacchus, the cult of "terroir," and the fantasy of pastoral
republicanism. Promoted by figures as varied as horticulturalist
Andrew Jackson Downing, novelist Charles Chesnutt, railroad baron
Leland Stanford, and Cincinnati land speculator Nicholas Longworth
(known as the father of American wine), these myths naturalized
claims to land for grape cultivation and legitimated national
expansion. Vineyards were simultaneously lush and controlled,
bearing fruit at once culturally refined and naturally robust,
laying claim to both earthy authenticity and social pedigree. The
history of wine culture thus reveals nineteenth-century Americans'
fascination with the relationship between nature and culture.
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