Charles Elliott
Beautiful Monster
The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, the Quest to Make It Bloom, and the World It Created
By Tatiana Holway
Oxford University Press 306pp £18.99
It’s a pretty good story. Sometime around 1837 a wandering German émigré named Robert Schomburgk, who had managed to convince the Royal Geographical Society to hire him as an explorer, reported finding an enormous and spectacular species of water lily deep in the Guiana jungle. Of course Schomburgk was not the first European to spot the water lily. As early as 1801 one Thaddäus Haenke discovered it growing near the Bolivia–Paraguay border, but all his collections disappeared when he died in Bolivia in 1817. Subsequently, a French botanist came upon it in the same area and ‘well nigh precipitated himself off the raft into the river … in his desire to secure specimens’. When another Frenchman actually succeeded in collecting leaves, flowers and seeds and shipped them to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, nobody paid them any attention. They almost completely rotted away. Yet Schomburgk’s timing was sensational: Guiana had only recently become a British possession and there was a new queen on the throne. The country was in a ferment of excitement over botany, with new plants arriving daily, and geography, as new territories were claimed. What better moment to celebrate jointly the glories of the nation and of nature?
The water lily that would bear the queen’s name – Victoria regia – was more than just another plant. Its leaves could grow to a diameter of eight feet with incredible speed (as much as an inch an hour), while its sweet-scented blossoms might exceed a foot in circumference. Its
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm