Book description
The lotus is the world's most iconic flower. Galvanised by receiving
seeds from a three-thousand-year-old lotus, which flowered without
difficulty in an English summer, Mark Griffiths set out to track the
path of this sublime plant to its home in the Lotus-Lands of Japan.
The Lotus Quest unveils a stunning vision of Japan's feudal
era, as Griffiths visits shrines, ruins, gardens and wild landscapes,
and meets priests and archaeologists, philosophers and
anthropologists, gardeners and botanists, poets and artists, and even
dines on the lotus in a Tokyo café.
Beautifully illustrated, intensely atmospheric and full of suspense,
The Lotus Quest shows how the deep crimson of the lotus runs
like a tracer dye, tracking the spread, fusion and fission of the
world's great civilizations.
Mark Griffiths
is one of Britain's leading plant experts. He is editor of
The New
Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening
, the largest work on horticulture ever published, and the author or
editor of numerous other books on gardening and botany. A Fellow of the
Linnean Society, he has written regularly for
The Times
and now contributes to
Country Life.
He lives in Oxford.
