Book description
One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried
down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just
arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not
bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds...
Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American
species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who
would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain
forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners
Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised
botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer
Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the
strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook's Endeavour.
This is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies,
united by a passion for plants. Set against the backdrop of the
emerging empire and the uncharted world beyond, The Brother
Gardeners tells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.
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.
