US Review Bookforum

“Wulf’s book, looking at the eighteenth-century roots of this craze, is a lavishly researched and very funny group biography of the cultivators, classifiers, and explorers whose mutual obsession with botany, she convincingly argues, defined and exemplified England’s relationship with the natural world during the Enlightenment ….

Characters such as the sturdy Bartram and the irascible Linnaeus make The Brother Gardeners an engaging group biography—and their writings furnish a wealth of background on the spirit of their age. Wulf never allows her material to overwhelm a vivid sense of the big picture, which keenly informs her sparkling narrative: a nation in revolution, bursting from a drab, monotonous engagement with the outside world into a creative, explosively variegated, frequently domineering one.”

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