The author of The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession is Andrea Wulf. Here’s the general link to her website. She also has a page with 136 posts about this book specifically.
I found this talk, The Brother Gardeners: the Royal Society and Britain’s obsession with gardening (38:27), in which she goes through a number of the topics in the book. It is a good reference to learn a bit more about the men who populate the pages of her book and serves as a synopsis of the book, for those who like to have a bit more information before they commit to reading a book.
Although I looked for video clips either of “re-creations” of the events or talks about the men highlighted in the book, there didn’t seem to be very many, especially for some of the less well-known men.
Thomas Fairchild (1667-1729) performed the first hybridization (in the western world) in the early 1700s. This link is to the wikipedia page. There does seem to be one book about him, The Ingenious Mr. Fairchild: The Forgotten Father of the Flower Garden, but most of the citations basically go to our book.
Phillip Miller (1691-1771) was the chief gardenerer at the Chelsea Physic Garden and wrote the often revised and very popular Gardener’s Dictionary (1396 pgs although I think it isn’t really that long). He was not a fan of Linnaeus’ system. More about Miller may be found in wikipedia.
Probably half (or more) of our book revolves around the relationship between Peter Collinson (1694-1768) and John Bartram (1699-1777).
Bartram’s garden, outside of Philadelphia, is open to the public. The link to that website is here. The wikipedia link for Bartram is here. Because Bartram was so important in the US, as were his sons and, I think, grandsons, this page includes many links that would provide good resources for further reading.
I have no idea what this actually is but as part of something called “The Wild Frontier,” apparently some sort of television series, there is an episode on William Bartram. I believe this is John’s son, who went off to the wilds of Florida but returned home eventually with plants and drawings.
As I told the group, I remember the North Carolina Botanic Garden having something from the Bartrams but I can’t find anything now. I shall continue searching… I did find this on the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. It is also about William.
Here’s the wikipedia page for Peter Collinson, who “discovered” Bartram and encouraged and supported Bartram’s botanizing habit.
One wikipedia link went to the records of Collinson’s correspondence at the UK National Archives. Personally, I never do well with archives because I think they mostly just tell you that they have information and then you need to work with the archivists directly. I always am hopeful that I’ll just be able to see it all online and download it!
One other wikipedia link on the Collinson page went to the travels of Bartram in Virginia, an article in the Journal of the American Antiquarian Society.
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) does appear rather more regularly in youtube videos as well as lots of websites. We looked briefly at this video (21:59), Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy.
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), the grandfather of the Darwin we all know, wrote a poem about Linnaeus’ system. This video (11:46) is titled Carl Linneaus and Erasmus Darwin but really focuses on Linnaeus and how his ideas influenced Erasmus Darwin. However, it appears to be part of a New York Botanic Garden exhibit Poetic Botany: Art and Science of the Eighteenth-Century Vegetable World. That is a digital exhibition that is still available online. Erasmus Darwin was a botanist himself and although I can’t see that he ever actually met Linnaeus, he did popularize Linnaeus’ system in his poem, The Loves of Plants. The poem can be read here.
Daniel Solander (1733-1782) was the protegé of Linnaeus and far more charming and far less egotistical. Linnaeus sent him to England with the hopes that Solander could charm the British into accepting his naming system and bring home some plants and herbarium specimens. Solander was successful at the former but reneged on the latter and never returned home to Sweden. There are several links to his work, for example, this one from the British Natural History Museum.
Joseph Banks (1743-1820) was a very wealthy landowner who was interested in the natural sciences. He and Solander became friends, and Banks became something of a patron/employer of Solander. The two travelled together on the Endeavor under Captain Cook. Banks later became president of the Royal Society. My summary gives short shrift to Banks role in the botanical world and you should be able to track down more information about him easily, should you wish. As usual, wikipedia is a reasonable starting point. I found this reading of his journal (7 hrs) from the Endeavor:
This video (58:41) desribes Banks’ Florilegium, his desire to publish drawings of, and information about, the 700-some new plants he and Solander collected. The oeuvre also has its own wikipedia page.
The mutiny on the Bounty ties into our book loosely through Captain Bligh. Banks sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavor and planned to sail with him a second time on the Resolution. A disagreement over how the ship should be outfitted led Banks to refuse to travel on it. Bligh was the sailing master of the Resolution and ultimately became a captain. While captain of the Bounty, on a trip to collect breadfruit plants as a cheap and nutritious food for slaves, the crew mutinied. Here’s an article about where the mutineers came ashore. In contrast to Wulf, who focuses on events as seen through the eyes of the botanists of the 1600s and 1700s, this article mentions the colonialism and some of the negative consequences that exist today.
Although Wulf focused primarily on these men and their work to bring plants to England, she concludes with a discussion of the plants themselves and how they led the English to become a nation of gardeners. Without the efforts of these men, she states, the British garden as we know it today would never have happened.