Conville & Walsh

When Andrea Wulf got her first small London garden, she didn’t know much about gardening. But when she discovered the hidden stories behind the flowers, she became hooked. These plants revealed tales of a group of men that had created a flower revolution in the eighteenth century and thereby laid the foundation of our gardens today – just as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine paved the way for modern democracy in the eighteenth century. 

These plant hunters, botanists, nurserymen and gardeners observed nature and experimented with plants, thereby casting aside myth and superstition which had reigned in the garden for centuries. Over the course of the eighteenth century as England became an Empire, they brought seven thousand new species to the nation’s gardens, they ordered and re-named all plants to create one international standard still is in use today and they brought botany and horticulture into the lives of the middle classes.

THE BROTHER GARDENERS is a group biography of the founding brothers of the modern garden. It is a tale of adventure, competition and commerce as well as science, reason and obsession. It also is the story of friendships that overcame class differences and national boundaries through a shared love for plants.

As the nineteenth century dawned, the possession of a garden came to be seen as an essential pre-requisite for happiness – and perhaps Englishness itself. And as the tendrils of the garden revolution stretched ever outwards, Anglomania swept through the Western world. Gardeners from Poland to Italy, from Sweden to Germany, from Russia to France and as far as America recreated ‘le jardin anglais’, ‘der Englische Garten’ or ‘il giardino inglese’. England had become the garden of the world.