The plant hunters of the 18th and 19th centuries, sent out by institutions such as Kew and the Royal Horticultural Society, were the astronauts of their day. As Thomas Pakenham relates in his finely wrought new book, The Tree Hunters: How the Cult of the Arboretum Transformed Our Landscape (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 384pp £30), these intrepid individuals were catapulted into faraway regions that were almost completely unknown to European science and tasked with gathering up strange and often magnificent plants, such as the Venus flytrap, the giant redwood and the monkey puzzle tree. Working-class men (many of them Scots who had been trained at English botanical gardens and private estates), they were singled out for their intelligence, toughness and resourcefulness. At one moment they were cosseting melons in glasshouses, the next they were ascending Chinese mountains or hacking through virgin forests in North America. 

There was an established tradition of identifying and promoting potential head gardeners from the rest of the herd, and the best of them – for example, Joseph Paxton and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown – went on to carve out stellar careers at home or abroad. But different qualities were required of plant hunters: their masters were not