Many of the world’s most renowned and exciting ornamental plants―including magnolias, roses, rhododendrons, tree peonies, lilies, and blue poppies―have their origins in China. In the mid-nineteenth century, professional plant hunters were dispatched by nurseries and botanic gardens to collect living botanical specimens from China for cultivation in Europe, and it is these adventurers and nurserymen who are often credited with the explosive bloom of Chinese flowers in the West. But as Jane Kilpatrick shows in Fathers of Botany, the first Westerners to come upon and document this bounty were in fact cut from a different cloth: the clergy. Following the Opium Wars, European missionaries were the first explorers to dig further into the Chinese interior and send home evidence of one of the richest and most varied floras ever seen, and it was their discoveries that caused a sensation among Western plantsmen. Both men of faith and talented botanists alike, these missionaries lent their names to many of the plants they discovered, but their own stories disappeared into the leaf litter of history. Drawing on their letters and contemporary accounts, Kilpatrick focuses on the lives of four great French missionary botanists―Pères Armand David (of Davidia involucrata―the dove tree―and discoverer of the giant panda), Jean Marie Delavay, Paul Guillaume Farges, and Jean André Soulié―as well as a group of other French priests, Franciscan missionaries, and a single German Protestant pastor who all amassed significant plant collections, as she unearths a lost chapter of botanical history. In so doing, she reminds today’s gardeners and botanists―and any of us who stop to smell the roses―of the enormous debt owed to these obscure fathers of botany.

Fathers of Botany: The Discovery of Chinese Plants by European Missionaries

History

Kilpatrick, Jane

Asia

University of Chicago Press

The first plant enthusiasts to reach China found a wonderful array of unfamiliar garden plants that had been nurtured by Chinese gardeners for thousands of years. This is the story of the struggles, the daring and the dogged perseverance of those early collectors. Where would we be without magnolias, camellias, chrysanthemums, tree peonies, repeat-flowering roses, viburnums and so many more? Jane Kilpatrick writes with knowledge and affection of the amateur pioneers and the plants they introduced to an audience that had not realized the flowers they had seen on wallpapers, silks and ceramics could be real.

Gifts from the Gardens of China

Frances Lincoln

THE GALANTHOPHILES is the first book to focus on the lives of snowdrop devotees during the years 1854 to 2014 when snowdrops came of horticultural age. It tells the stories of the most important individuals whose fascination with every aspect of the genus Galanthus ensured the survival of so many of the snowdrops we grow today. The stories are interwoven with accounts of the introduction of new snowdrop species and new snowdrop variants and provide a history of Galanthus cultivation in Britain.

Galanthophiles

Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Gardening & Landscape Design

Orphans Publishing

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