The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession
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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. The New York Times - Miranda Seymour Throughout The Brother Gardeners, Wulf's flair for storytelling is combined with scholarship, brio and a charmingly airy style…She has written a delightful book—and you don't need to be a gardener to enjoy it.
Introduction 1 Prologue: The Fairchild Mule 6 Pt. I Roots 1 Forget not Mee & My Garden 19 2 The bright beam of gardening 34 3 My harmless sexual system 48 4 Pray go very Clean, neat & handsomely Dressed to Virginia 66 Pt. II Growth 5 All gardening in landscape-painting 85 6 Send no Seeds for him ... all is att an End 98 7 Commonwealth of Botany 112 8 The English are all, more or less, gardeners 132 9 See what a complete empire we have now got within ourselves 149 Pt. III Harvest 10 Ye who o'er Southern Ocean wander 173 11 An Academy of Natural History 193 12 As good-humored a mondescript Otatheitan as ever! 207 13 Loves of the Plants 222 Epilogue 243 Glossary 247 Bibliography 267 Notes 283 Picture Credits 336 Acknowledgements 340 Index 343
