The Naming of Names - Softcover

Anna Pavord

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0747582440 ISBN 13: 9780747582441

Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks, 2007

Synopsis

For centuries, some of the most brilliant minds in Europe searched for the rules of nature's game. In a world full of plagues and poisons, many medicines were made from plant extracts and there was a practical need to differentiate between one plant and another. Alongside this was an overwhelming desire to make sense of the natural world. Scholars, aided by the artists who painted the first pictures of plants, set out looking, writing and classifying, but 2,000 years were to pass before any rules became clear. Anna Pavord takes us on an exhilarating and fascinating journey through botanical history, travelling from Athens in the third century BC, through Constantinople and Venice, Padua and Pisa to the present day.

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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Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0747582440
• ISBN 13: 9780747582441
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 1