Planting the World

Joseph Banks and his Collectors: An Adventurous History of Botany

De: Jordan Goodman

Narrado por: Paul Hilliar

‘Based on meticulous research in original sources … Goodman illustrates vividly how adept [Banks] was … Shining a light on individuals whose achievements are relatively uncelebrated’
Jenny Uglow, New York Review of Books

A bold new history of how botany and global plant collecting – centred at Kew Gardens and driven by Joseph Banks – transformed the earth.

Botany was the darling and the powerhouse of the eighteenth century. As European ships ventured across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, discovery bloomed. Bounties of new plants were brought back, and their arrival meant much more than improved flowerbeds – it offered a new scientific frontier that would transform Europe’s industry, medicine, eating and drinking habits, and even fashion.

Joseph Banks was the dynamo for this momentous change. As botanist for James Cook’s great voyage to the South Pacific on the Endeavour, Banks collected plants on a vast scale, armed with the vision – as a child of the Enlightenment – that to travel physically was to advance intellectually. His thinking was as intrepid as Cook’s seafaring: he commissioned radically influential and physically daring expeditions such as those of Francis Masson to the Cape Colony, George Staunton to China, George Caley to Australia, William Bligh to Tahiti and Jamaica, among many others.

Jordan Goodman’s epic history follows these high seas adventurers and their influence in Europe, as well as taking us back to the early years of Kew Gardens, which Banks developed devotedly across the course of his life, transforming it into one of the world’s largest and most diverse botanical gardens.

In a rip-roaring global expedition, based on original sources in many languages, Goodman gives a momentous history of how the discoveries made by Banks and his collectors advanced scientific understanding around the world.

©2020 Jordan Goodman (P)2020 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Reseñas de la Crítica

"A brilliant and authoritative insight into the global reach of Joseph Banks, one of the great figures of the Enlightenment, through the lives of the intrepid botanists, gardeners, and nurserymen whose explorations and adventures made it all possible." (Peter Crane)

"The story of 18th century European botanists, their ships and voyages, united by the mind and extraordinary energy of Joseph Banks as he developed both the science and gardens of England. It is a marvellous history packed with naval explorations, plant collecting, and the role of individuals in making Britain a major centre for global botany." (Janet Browne)

Detailed But Bland

If you're interested in the minute details of 18th-century botany, maritime exploration and its logistics, Joseph Banks and his scientific networks, this book is for you. Goodman reads Banks as a kind of puppet-master working in a global context. The chapters on China and Australia were particularly captivating, as was his account of Bligh and the Bread-fruit tree. Two warnings, however. Firstly, the plants play second fiddle in a book written in a style more akin to military or economic history. However enthusiastic the performance is, the prose makes for exceptionally dull reading in areas. As listener, this leaves you wondering at times why on earth the reader is reading with such insane excitement. Second, the author has a fetish for exact dates, and they are shot out at you like meaningless canon balls. The plants are just these things, or props, and this made the book a little colourless. These two problems aside, listening to this book taught me much about plant collecting in a global context.