A Good Book Deserves a Good Book Cover…

    Working in a botanical garden, I get to read lots of charming books I might not run across elsewhere.  After writing this little review for our library, I was inspired to design some patterns suitable for book covers that reflected the feel of old books while retaining all the fun of a modern read.

7 Gardens and 300 Years of English History

The Brother Gardeners by Andrea Wulf, 2010.

Andrea Wulf moves from Germany to England and is quickly swept into the British pastime for gardening, where it is not a hobby, but rather an obsession!  This book is the result of Wulf’s personal investigation into why all the English—from apartment dwellers to shop assistants and bankers to builders—are so passionate about gardening that, as an immigrant, she must learn how to garden in order to assimilate!  Her answer?  The birth of the English gardening passion is sparked by the wide variety of plants found in the New World – America.

Prepare yourself for adventure as we follow colonists in America trekking through the wilderness, the real story of the Mutiny on the Bounty, Linnaeus-the-conceited out to unify plant classification, and travel the ocean with Captain Cook.  Follow the trials and tribunes of gardeners back in Britain trying desperately to cultivate forests from individual seeds stuck in moldy paper packets, with or without labels.  The English quest for plant variety is all-consuming!

If you like history, sailing the ocean blue, plants and a good mutiny now and then, this is well worth the read.