"By the time Wulf concludes her lively account of
the plant-hunters who gave birth to the English garden, she has rendered with
clarity and grace a significant chapter in horticultural history and recounts
in loving detail the development of England into a nation of gardeners.
And she does not stop with the end of her
narrative but instead includes a detailed glossary of each plant mentioned,
which can be used as a reference while reading or as an independent source for
learning about or choosing plants.
"The Brother Gardeners" glows with
Wulf's love of her subject, a love fed by her prodigious research. And her
prose is elegant, humorous and accessible to the general reader. Somewhere in
the celestial gardens, the late British writers Beverley Nichols and Vita
Sackville-West must be smiling on this work, which exists, as Wulf writes, in
"a world in which flowers, trees and shrubs took precedence over war and
politics."
The sun may have set on the British Empire, but the sun still shines on gardeners everywhere and on the plants that caught the eye of the people so vividly described in this erudite, pleasurable and handsome book."
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