The Naming of Names - Hardcover

Anna Pavord

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747579520 ISBN 13: 9780747579526

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 2005

Synopsis

Shelf wear and a few marks to the dust jacket. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

About this title

About the Author:

Anna Pavord is the gardening correspondent for the Independent and the author of eight previous books, including the bestselling The Tulip. She contributes to a number of magazines, both in the US and the UK and regularly fronts programmes for BBC Radio 3 and 4. She chairs the Gardens Panel of the National Trust and sits on the Parks and Gardens Panel of English Heritage. She lives in Dorset, England, where she spent thirty years restoring the garden of an old rectory. She has recently moved to a new house and started another garden. She is married and has three daughters.

From Publishers Weekly:

Pavord, author of the The Tulip and an expert gardener, traces the history of plant taxonomy from the ancient Greeks to 17th-century British botanist John Ray in this hefty tome, and though her passion for plants is apparent on every page, readers who don't share the same level of enthusiasm will be frustrated by Pavord's encyclopedic approach. Pavord, in prose as rich and colorful as the too-infrequent illustrations, contextualizes plant classification within larger intellectual, political and cultural spheres, but she verges dangerously close to writing a textbook; the vast amount of information she packs into brief, rapid-fire sections can overwhelm. In the best sections, she slows down to draw detailed portraits of researchers and describe how each contributed to the slowly evolving (and, until the late 1600's, unnamed) science of botany. Ray, for instance, marked "a quiet, lonely, dogged consummation" with "no fireworks, no claps of thunder, no swelling symphonic themes" when, shortly before his death and suffering from gangrene, he penned the six fundamental rules of botany. Pavord's prose dazzles, but it's not enough to carry readers with a casual interest in plants or gardening through an otherwise dense history.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0747579520
• ISBN 13: 9780747579526
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 471