biography literature

Presents the story of internationally acclaimed botanical illustrator, Celia Rosser, who dedicated her life to painting the entire genus of Banksia, the only artist to have done such a task. Her dedication to the task put her at the centre of the Monash Banksia Project underwritten by the University for twenty-five years and culminating in the production of an extraordinary three-volume florilegium that became one of the great books published in the twentieth century. This is also the story of the emergence of an artist, who grew up in difficult circumstances during the Great Depression, and pursued her art partly as a way of protecting herself from the harsher side of life. The narrative stays focussed on the path of the artist, as she grows up, develops her talent, and learns to understand and take advantage of it. The story follows her struggles to pursue her artistic passion while fulfilling the expectations of women in 1950s to subordinate themselves to their husbands as wives and mothers. As her children become more independent, she recognises opportunities and, eventually, finds a place at Monash University to fully express herself through her art. In telling this story of Celia Rosser’s unparalleled talent and extraordinary achievement, this book explores the history of Botanical Illustration, Botany, academia, gardens and their herbarium and Australia’s place in changing the shape of the world.

Many of the most renowned and exciting ornamental plants such as magnolias, roses, rhododendrons, tree peonies, lilies, and blue poppies, have their origins in China. In the mid-nineteenth century, professional plant hunters were dispatched by nurseries and botanic gardens to collect living botanical specimens from China for cultivation in Europe, and it is these adventurers and nurserymen who are often credited with the explosive bloom of Chinese flowers in the West. But as Jane Kilpatrick shows in Fathers of Botany, the first Westerners to come upon and document this bounty were in fact cut from a different cloth: the clergy.

Thomas Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) was the charismatic and persuasive founder of Singapore and Governor of Java. An English adventurer, disobedient employee of the East India Company, utopian imperialist, linguist, zoologist and civil servant, he carved an extraordinary (though brief) life for himself in South East Asia. The tropical, disease-ridden settings of his story are as dramatic as his own trajectory – an obscure young man with no advantages other than talent and obsessive drive, who changed history by establishing – without authority – on the wretchedly unpromising island of Singapore, a settlement which has become a world city. After a turbulent time in the East Indies, Raffles returned to the UK and turned to his other great interests – botany and zoology. He founded London Zoo in 1825, a year before his death. Raffles remains a controversial figure, and in the first biography for over forty years, Victoria Glendinning charts his prodigious rise within the social and historical contexts of his world. His domestic and personal life was vivid and shot through with tragedy. His own end was sad, though his fame immortal.

‘…la piu magnifica flora del mondo’ [the most magnificent flora in the world] – Michele Tenore (1780-1861), Professor of Botany, University of Naples. “The Flora Graeca” is one of the most extraordinary botanical publications of all time. The spectacular quality of the botanical illustrations, the size of the publication (10 double folio volumes), its cost on publication (over GBP 620 in 1830) and the lengths to which people went to see it all added to the Flora’s reputation. Indeed, there were so few copies of the first printing – just twenty five – that some people were skeptical that the book existed! This book summarizes the story of the Flora Graca enterprise, profiling the leading characters, John Sibthorp and his celebrated illustrator Ferdinand Bauer, and charting their eastern Mediterranean adventures; the scientific and artistic aspects of the publication and its printing history. It also looks at the horticultural legacy of Sibthorp’s voyages and the plants he brought back to England, such as Crocus flavus ssp. flavus collected in Turkey, now popular in its own right as one of the parents of a popular garden hybrid, ‘Golden Yellow’, and Cyclamen persicum collected in Cyprus, now one of the most widely grown autumn-flowering species and the parent of many of the garden cyclamens.
Heavily illustrated, the book brings together images of Sibthorp’s specimens (looking remarkably fresh after 180 years) and illustrations from the original watercolours and the engravings preserved in Oxford. It makes available in print more images from the “Flora Graeca”.

Fourteen papers drawing together the many threads of Banks’s wide ranging interest and world-wide influence he had in the progress and development of science, technology, horticulture, agriculture, trade and politics.