Miranda Seymour
Herbal History
A Little History of British Gardening
By Jenny Uglow
Chatto & Windus 342pp £15.99 order from our bookshop
Tales of the Rose Tree: Ravishing Rhododendrons and Their Travels Around the World
By Jane Brown
HarperCollins 308pp £20 order from our bookshop
One of the stars of Jenny Uglow’s previous book, The Lunar Men, was Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, author of a remarkably fanciful and elaborate scientific poem, ‘The Botanic Garden’, and of a hefty tome on the science of gardening and agriculture. Dr Danvin was also a keen promoter of hothouses: his own was eighty-two feet long and provided him with melons, cucumbers and grapes, but not, he reluctantly admitted, pineapples.
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