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In 1837, while charting the Amazonian country of Guiana for Great Britain, German naturalist Robert Schomburgk discovered an astounding "vegetable wonder"--a huge water lily whose leaves were five or six feet across and whose flowers were dazzlingly white. In England, a horticultural nation with a mania for gardens and flowers, news of the discovery sparked a race to bring a live specimen back, and to bring it to bloom. In this extraordinary plant, named Victoria regia for the newly crowned queen, the flower-obsessed British had found their beau ideal. In The Flower of Empire, Tatiana Holway tells the story of this magnificent lily, revealing how it touched nearly every aspect of Victorian life, art, and culture. Holway's colorful narrative captures the sensation stirred by Victoria regia in England, particularly the intense race among prominent Britons to be the first to coax the flower to bloom. We meet the great botanists of the age, from the legendary Sir Joseph Banks, to Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to the extravagant flower collector the Duke of Devonshire. Perhaps most important was the Duke's remarkable gardener, Joseph Paxton, who rose from garden boy to knight, and whose design of a series of ever-more astonishing glass-houses--one, the Big Stove, had a footprint the size of Grand Central Station--culminated in his design of the architectural wonder of the age, the Crystal Palace. Fittingly, Paxton based his design on a glass-house he had recently built to house Victoria regia. Indeed, the natural ribbing of the lily's leaf inspired the pattern of girders supporting the massive iron-and-glass building. From alligator-laden jungle ponds to the heights of Victorian society, The Flower of Empire unfolds the marvelous odyssey of this wonder of nature in a revealing work of cultural history.
From the bijou corners of Corpus Christi to the wide open lawns of Trinity, Oxford's gardens are full of surprises and hidden corners - not least the fellows' or masters' gardens, which are usually kept resolutely private. Take a tour of the stunning gardens of this prestigious British institution without leaving your armchair with this elegant, authoritative analysis full of glorious photographs which reveal their full interest and charm. The gardens of Oxford's thirty or so colleges are surprisingly varied in style, age and size, ranging from the ancient mound in the middle of New College to the fine modernist design which is St Catherine's. The eighteenth-century landscape school is represented in the magnificent acreage of Worcester, while the twentieth-century vogue for rock gardening is reflected at St John's. Founded in 1621, the university's Botanic Garden is the oldest botanic garden in Britain, holds one of the most diverse plant collections in the world, and has been a source of inspiration for writers from Lewis Carroll to Philip Pullman.
The Oxford Book of Food Plants is a beautifully illustrated compendium of facts about the plants we grow in our gardens and use in our cooking. Gorgeous botanical illustrations are accompanied by accessible yet authoritative descriptions of each plant, along with fascinating historical details and nutritive values. This is a new edition of a classic book — fully updated with the latest nutritional research, as well as beautiful new plates and descriptions of many exotic edible plants that have only recently found their way into our markets and onto our kitchen tables — it is a must-have for anyone who loves good food, cooking, and gardening.