biography literature

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.

Edred John Henry Corner was one of the most colourful and productive biologists and mycologists of the 20th century. His career began in 1929 in Singapore, where he trained monkeys to collect specimens from the treetops of the rainforest, and published Wayside Trees of Malaya, a classic field guide interspersed with his delightful and idiosyncratic observations on plant life. He was key in the creation of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, a 163- hectare plot that contains more tree species than the whole of North America. During the war, he considered it his responsibilty to safeguard the scientific and cultural collections of Singapore during the Japanese Occupation, but was branded by some as a collaborator. Post-war, after heading the ambitious UNESCO Hylean Amazon Project, he returned to Cambridge University and was appointed Professor of Tropical Botany in 1965.
e was elected a Fellow of The Royal Society, where he promoted the conservation of tropical forests and led expeditions to the British Solomon Islands and Mount Kinabalu. After 46 years, John Corner discovers his estranged father through letters, pictures and other memorabilia, resulting in an engaging and frank biography of an eminent scientist who put science above all, including his family.

‘…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”.

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.