The Joy of Gardening by Vanessa Berridge

Author:Vanessa Berridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2014-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Ten all-time top gardeners

André Le Nôtre - Absolutely fabulous

William Kent - He saw all nature was a garden

Carl Linnaeus - What's in a name? Or two names?

Lancelot 'Capability' Brown - The landscape supremo

Sir Joseph Banks - Imperial gardener extraordinaire

Sir Joseph Paxton - The Victorian go-to man

Gertrude Jekyll - Arts and Crafty

Vita Sackville-West - Rooms with a view

Roberto Burle Marx - Modernism in the jungle

Beth Chatto - Right plant in the right place

Tales of plant-hunting derring-do

• Taken along by his boss, the Duke of Buckingham, John Tradescant the Elder dodged the bullets at the siege of the Ile de Re in 1627, and managed even to do a spot of botanising

• Kew Gardens' first official plant collector, Francis Masson, hid in a hut overnight from a potentially murderous party of escaped 'Hottentot' convicts in South Africa in 1773

• The mutiny on the Bounty in 1789 was caused by Captain Bligh giving water to the breadfruit he was carrying to the West Indies for Banks rather than to his sailors

• In 1797, the dauntless Francis Masson was further shaken by being captured by French privateers and imprisoned for several weeks with barely enough food and water

• In 1834, David Douglas, the introducer to the UK of many plants including the Douglas fir and the Sitka spruce, fell into a bull pit in Hawaii and was gored to death by its occupant

• In 1886, French priest Fa ther Jean Marie Delavay, discoverer of the blue poppy, Meconopsis betonicifolia, caught bubonic plague while plant hunting in Yunnan in China and never recovered his health

• Ernest 'Lily' Wilson is so called because he found the royal lily, Lilium regale, in a rocky crevice in China. Thrown hundreds of feet down the mountain by a landslide, he was left with a lifelong limp to remind him of his discovery

• Reginald Farrer, the father of British rock gardening, spent years hunting alpines in China but was finally defeated by the climate of the unexplored mountains of Upper Burma in 1920

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.