Recommended book

[Kelly]

It was great to see everyone last night. Carol, thanks for hosting.

The book I recommended is The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and
the Birth of an Obsession, by Andrea Wulf.

Here is the blurb from Amazon:

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.


Also, here is the link with info about visiting Bartram's Garden in
Philadelphia: http://www.bartramsgarden.org

[mi...@aol.com]

I just ordered my own copy on Amazon.  Thanks for the recommendation Kelly!

 

Leslie