Promotional Information

A wonderfully readable investigation of the origins of the modern garden in 18th-century England. Popular history at its finest.

About the Author

Andrea Wulf was born India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art and is the co-author (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) of This Other Eden- Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, Mail on Sunday, The Garden, the Architects' Journal, and regularly reviews for several newspapers, including the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a regular contributor to BBC radio and television.

Reviews

This absorbing and delightful book about 18th-century botanists stands out among histories of plant hunting ... Works superbly
*Sunday Telegraph*

Rounded, generous and exhaustively researched ... She is very adept at telling a good story, and in the history and origins of gardening she has found the perfect vehicle ... An excellent, hugely entertaining and instructive tale, and Wulf tells it very well
*The Guardian*

Wondrous ... I have learned so much from her book
*Jon Snow, Channel Four News*

A delightful book ... Remarkably vivid
*Adrian Tinniswood*

Engrossing ... A gripping story, told here with grace and aplomb
*Country Life*

This absorbing and delightful book about 18th-century botanists stands out among histories of plant hunting ... Works superbly -- Jenny Uglow * Sunday Telegraph *
Rounded, generous and exhaustively researched ... She is very adept at telling a good story, and in the history and origins of gardening she has found the perfect vehicle ... An excellent, hugely entertaining and instructive tale, and Wulf tells it very well -- Mark Cocker * The Guardian *
Wondrous ... I have learned so much from her book -- Jon Snow, Channel Four News
A delightful book ... Remarkably vivid -- Adrian Tinniswood
Engrossing ... A gripping story, told here with grace and aplomb -- Tim Richardson * Country Life *

A garden will never look quite the same after you've read this book on the 18th-century British botanists who exploited the colonial system to acquire thousands of previously unknown plant species. Wulf argues that their imports vastly increased the blooming season and variety of English gardens, enabling gardeners to create the naturalistic "English" gardens coming into fashion after the geometry of the previous century. The London merchant (and backyard gardener) Peter Collinson persuaded Philadelphia's John Bartram to make plant-collecting treks through the wilderness, and this results in the introduction to British gardens of such mainstays of the modern border as azalea, mountain laurel, paper birch, and wisteria. Bartram supplied seeds to propagate North American varieties of oak, pine, hemlock, and cedar across the ocean. New species also appeared from Australia and Asia. Ships circumnavigated the globe to collect and classify new plants (including an ill-fated voyage captained by William Bligh). The brother gardeners resisted (but eventually gave way to) the novel system invented by obstreperous Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus to classify the confusing array of new discoveries. Verdict Wulf's book will be of interest to anyone with a garden, even if it's on a windowsill.-Stewart Desmond, New York Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.