The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession

Exactly what I was looking for.

Fantastic book documenting the historical facts around the importation of plants to England as well as the history of the scientific plant names. A great read for those who love history, gardening, English and American 18th century history. An easy read.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Any Gardener Will Love This Book

My interest in gardening and plants, coupled with my interest in history made this book intensely interesting to me. I was prompted to pick it up after a trip to John Bartram's Garden, in Philadelphia, now open to visitors. A wonderfully presented look back into time, and a surprise reveal that the beautiful estates and parks of Europe got their nursery stock from one man in the Colony!

Enjoyable

This book describes how the introduction of the many new plant and flower species from the New World and Australia jump-kicked botany into a modern science and set off an English gardening craze that spread throughout Europe. The book is written in an easy-to-read, gossipy manner, so that the reader doesn't have to be a botanist to enjoy the prissy, nitpicking characters the author introduces.
The book is nicely illustrated throughout. Fair warning: about half the bulk of the book is given over to a glossary, bibliography, notes, etc. The text is just shy of 250 pages.

Interesting and Fantastic.

I am 50 percent through this book, and I find it exceedingly interesting on several levels--such as botany and taxonomy, botany and commerce/trade, botany and world travel (field ecology), botany and politics, botany and the upper class, botany and hothouses, botany and landscaping, naturalists, British history and U.S. history relating to botany. It is very well written. One may not necessarily agree with some of the themes as presented, but the wide range of material and the way it is presented is just amazing.

Great book

I really enjoyed reading this book. It was an area of history that is generally untouched on and of great interest to me.

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