The Plant Hunters: Two Hundred Years of Adventure and Discovery Around the World - Hardcover

Musgrave, Toby; Gardner, Chris; Musgrave, Will

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0706377532 ISBN 13: 9780706377538

Publisher: Ward Lock Ltd, 1999

Synopsis

This is the story of the men who discovered and brought back a wealth of exotic new plants. Journeying through remote and beautiful lands, often in great peril, they collected the plants that shaped western garden design for 200 years. The stories are illustrated with portraits, photographs and maps. The book traces the journeys of 10 of the most significant plant hunters, from the 18th century to the last of the professionals, Frank Kingdon-Ward. It travels with Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks to South America, New Zealand and Australia. It treks over 9000 miles across North America with David Douglas, who laid claim to 200 species. It also explores California, South America and South East Asia with the Lobb brothers, and climbs into the Himalaya with Joseph Hooker in search of spectacular rhododendrons. It follows Robert Fortune, as he smuggles tea plants out of China, the foundation of a vast cash crop vital to the development of the Empire. These and other stories vividly bring to life the pioneering work of plant hunters.

About this title

Reviews

Ever wonder how flowers from all over the world ended up in the same modern gardens? The plant hunters are the answer: Sir Joseph Banks, "the father of modern plant hunting," circled the globe with Captain Cook, bringing back rubescent evergreens from Tierra del Fuego and tall, "swordlike, leathery" New Zealand flax. From Kew Gardens in 18th-century London, Banks set up "a systematic, worldwide plant hunting program" that brought 7000 species of plants into habitats they would never have reached. Banks's prot g Francis Masson toted the belladona lily and the cycad from South Africa to London. Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker introduced rhododendrons from the Himalayas, thereby shaping British gardening throughout the 1860s. And George Forrest endured civil war and mountain hardships in his treks across Yunnan, China, bringing back for his pains the spectacular scarlet Primula and a star-shaped gentian with the deep blue tint of outer space. The authors devote a chapter to each of these men, and five other admiring chapters to other explorers, showing what each famous plant hunter underwent to bring prize flora to Britain, and what effect each hunter's discoveries had on British landscaping and gardening. In the spirit of the Victorian amateur, this book doesn't address such questions as whether these exciting exotics damaged the ecosystems to which plant hunters brought them, or what these finds contributed to fields other than landscape gardening. It offers, instead, stories of daring explorers alongside beautiful pictures of plants and of the spectacular landscapes from which these men fetched back the stems and flowers that gardeners love so well. 90 color, 15 b&w illustrations.

Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ward Lock Ltd
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0706377532
• ISBN 13: 9780706377538
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224