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.

From ancient civilizations, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from the golden age of scientific exploration and discovery in the eighteenth century and nineteenth centuries to today, the systematic search for plants and the riches that could be gained from them has endured.