Fathers of Botany: The Discovery of Chinese Plants by European Missionaries - Couverture rigide

Kilpatrick, Jane

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 022620670X ISBN 13 : 9780226206707

Editeur : University of Chicago Press, 2015

Synopsis

Many of the world's most renowned and exciting ornamental plants-including 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.

A propos du livre

Revue de presse

Behind many successes in this superb year for gardening runs a common thread which I have only just appreciated. Maybe you can see it at once. The electrifyingly blue flowers on Corydalis flexuosa have now finished. The dark-backed petals on a mock orange blossom, Philadelphus delavayi, have never been so abundant. In mid-May I marvelled at huge bushes of wondrous blue-violet Rhododendron augustinii above carpets of bluebells in the superb woodland garden at Bowood House in Wiltshire, a yearly place of pilgrimage for those of us who cannot grow rhododendrons in our own gardens. Since then, there have been weeks of spectacular single yellow flowers on the suckering shrub rose, Rosa hugonis. My late-flowering white-flowered Viburnum henryi has taken over the limelight, an under-appreciated beauty among shrubs. Nearer ground level the deep rose-pink flowers on the incarvilleas have just stopped. I could go on, citing lilacs, especially double-flowered varieties, or many of the cotoneasters whose late red fruits are a delight in autumn. The common thread behind these plants and many more is that all of them come from natural homes in China. They are not only Chinese. All of them were found and brought into our gardens thanks to French Catholic missionaries. They were collected from the wild in an amazing span of about seventy years from 1840 until 1913. Under the imprint of Kew gardens, the garden historian Jane Kilpatrick has now explained these committed Christians achievements with admirable clarity and freshness. Their individual stories are not new, but she draws them very ably into a related whole. Historians and gardeners can all gain from her unmissable book Fathers of Botany, about the remarkable men who took Christianity to remote parts of China and put such energy in to collecting superb plants, unknown at the time in the west. Kilpatrick is herself a keen gardener and has helped me to appreciate the separate areas of these great collectors activity across very different zones of China by her extremely clear maps and excellent photographs. --Financial Times (shortened version)

Fathers David, Delavay and Farges are only a few of the best-known Catholic priests whose names confront gardeners yearly in the names of beloved shrubs and trees. Davidias, or Pocket Handkerchief trees, Paulownia fargesii with blue flowers in May, many fine magnolias and many roses and rhododendrons came into western gardens thanks to the collections by Frenchmen who were in the field to save souls from hell. Instead, they saved western gardens from the dreariness of nothing but native flowering plants. Behind their commitment stood important institutional support in France. After the Napoleonic era, Catholic societies were formed to propagate the Faith , with no intention of propagating roses and rare trees of Acer griseum. In the 1830s the Missions Etrangères de Paris were directed by Rome to be evangelists of southern and western China as far as remote and forbidding Tibet. Members had to be under 35 years of age and ordained as priests. Nobody in the Vatican imagined for one moment that the missions lasting legacy would be a deluge of superbly beautiful plants --Financial Times (shortened version)

Biographie de l'auteur

Jane Kilpatrick is an Oxford-educated freelance historian and garden writer who is based in the UK. She is the author of Gifts from the Gardens of China: The Introduction of Traditional Chinese Garden Plants to Britain 1698?1862.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press
• Date d'édition: 2015
• ISBN 10: 022620670X
• ISBN 13: 9780226206707
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 224