Plant Book Excerpt

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The Plants that Shaped Our Gardens

by David Stuart
(Harvard University Press)

"As trade with and through the East developed, and as settlement in the Americas increased, intense fascination grew among those who stayed at home, whether in Paris, Milan or London, or on their country estates, for (plants) brought home from these distant lands.

Literacy became much more widespread than it had been in previous centuries, so avid collectors could write to friends, relatives, even strangers, who were visiting in distant places and ask them to send home anything interesting that caught their eye. At the end of the seventeenth century, the East was still the main source of new plants. ..."

(From "Garden Bookshelf," distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)

Resources
The Plants that Shaped Our Gardens
by David Stuart (ISBN: 0674007905)
(Harvard University Press, April 2002)
Available at book stores