The Brother Gardeners

Botany, Empire & the Birth of an Obsession
by Andrea Wulf

A half dozen titans from the horticultural pantheon - including Linnaeus! Bartram! Collinson! Banks! - star in this exceptionally readable narrative of an important epoch in the history of botany and gardens. Andrea Wulf uses her journalism skills to bring an immediacy and vitality to this transformational period, when the plants of the New World created a garden revolution in Britain, and from there the rest of the world. These six figures - Philip Miller and Daniel Solander are the other two - are fascinating not jsut for the discoveries they made but the humanity they show: they are brave, petty, intelligent, and envious, all in their quest to know more.

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