Product Description

A fascinating history of Britain's plant biodiversity and a unique account of how our garden landscape has been transformed over 1000 years, from 200 species of plant in the year 1000 to the astonishing variety of plants we can all see today. Thousands of plants have been introduced into Britain since 1066 by travellers, warriors, explorers and plant hunters - plants that we now take for granted such as rhododendron from the Far East, gladiolus from Africa and exotic plants like the monkey puzzle tree from Chile. Both a plant history and a useful reference book, Maggie Campbell-Culver has researched the provenance and often strange histories of many of the thousands of plants, exploring the quirky and sometimes rude nature of the plants, giving them a personality all of their own and setting them in their social context. The text is supported by beautiful contemporary paintings and modern photographs in 2 X 8 pp colour sections.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #190661 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 449 pages

The Times Literary Supplement
An impressive work in both scope and detail. The story is a fascinating one...A most welcome and accessible reference work

Financial Times
The extraordinary explosion in biodiversity over the past millennium is the subject of this fascinating work

Western Morning News
Not only a good read, but it’s a gardening, history and reference book skilfully interwoven.

Customer Reviews

Fascinating facts and beautiful illustrations
This is a lovely book that makes a perfect present for anyone who is interested in history, or plants or art. Some of the illustrations are quite exquisite.
Each century from the 11th to the 20th has its own chapter with significant dates listed at the beginning. The history of England is then intertwined with the history of plants and the stories of the people who discovered them. In the chapter on the Normans, for instance, Maggie Campbell-Culver tells us that the Wild Carnation or Clove Pink is thought to have been brought over from France after the Norman Conquest with the building stone brought from Caen for the construction of William's castles.
The illustrations range from engravings, through beautifully reproduced illuminated manuscripts to exquisite pen and inks and watercolours.
I have already bought two copies for friends and now intend to buy one for myself.

A Must of an English gardeners library
This is an extensively researched and well-written book that investigates how garden plants arrived in England. The writer, a respected garden historian and fellow of the Linnean Society, has chosen to divide her material into centuries. She sets the scene with a look at Roman and Anglo-Saxon approaches to gardening and plants, then gets into more detail about plant immigrants, starting with the first century of the second millennium.

To put the reader more clearly in the picture the writer starts each chapter (century) with a list of significant dates so we can see how historical events influenced the arrival of plants. In the twelfth century, for example, plant introductions were influenced by the Crusades as plants were brought to Britain from the eastern Mediterranean region.

But this is not just a book about plants; it’s also about the people associated with them. Sir Thomas More, for example, who in his book Utopia envisaged a town where everyone had a garden around their home.

New plants are still arriving in England from around the world. A “living fossil” tree was discovered in Australia in 1994. Its Latin name is Wollemia nobilis (it was found by David Noble) and it is known as the Dinosaur pine. Plants have been arriving from every continent for centuries and shared back and forth especially to Europe and the US. Just as many new plants went from the New World to brighten English gardens, so seeds and plants were taken to North America by English settlers to create gardens in their new homeland.

If you enjoy reading about the background and history of plants, who found them and how they came to us, you will enjoy this book. It has a very decent bibliography and deserves a place in every plantsman’s (and woman’s) library.

Struggles to get beyond being a list of facts and dates
Such an interesting subject and I have laboured on with this book because the facts are fascinating. However, it has taken me over a month (forever in terms of how quickly I read) and I typically can only read short chunks here and there because the fascinating subject has been rendered pretty dull by the writing style.

What it lacks is fluid, colourful writing that weaves the facts into a compelling narrative, and where anecdote is introduced it feels very jarred - like the author isn't comfortable moving away from the facts in their driest sense.

I think it is more successful as a factual reference book than as an entertaining light read - you have to be pretty into the subject to keep turning the pages of this one.