Additional References and Sources
Sources referenced in the text are not repeated here.
Introduction: The Vegetable Plot
p. 1 ‘Just before he died’: Edward Lear, The Cretan Journal, ed. Rowena Fowler, Dedham: Denise Harvey & Co., 1984.
p. 5 ‘It’s odd that we haven’t’: Rationales for plant conservation, see: Global Strategy for Plant Conservation: A Review of the UK’s Progress towards 2020, Salisbury: Plantlife, 2014; Tony Juniper, What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? How Money Really Does Grow on Trees, London: Profile Books, 2013; George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’, 1946, in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, Vol. IV, London: Secker & Warburg, 1968.
p. 7 ‘the Language of Flowers’: For a sensitive modern fictional exploration, see Vanessa Diffenbaugh, The Language of Flowers, London: Macmillan, 2011.
p. 8 ‘The great Romantic lover’: Coleridge: in Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. II, 1801–1806, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956.
How to See a Plant
p. 10 ‘The [lotus] emerges’: Zhou Dunyi’s homily and other lotus lore is quoted in Jennifer Potter, Seven Flowers and How They Shaped Our World, London: Atlantic Books, 2013.
p. 10 ‘Vegetal hygiene becomes’: The nano-technology of lotus leaves: see Peter Forbes, ‘The Gecko’s Foot: Bio-inspiration – Engineered from Nature’, Nature, no. 7065, 2005, p. 166.
1. Symbols from the Ice: Plants as Food and Forms
p. 13 ‘The compelling images’: For overviews of ice age art see Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut, Journey through the Ice Age, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997. Also the first chapters of N. K. Sandars, Prehistoric Art in Europe, 2nd edn, Harmonsworth: Penguin, 1985.
p. 17 ‘His own interpretation’: Tony Hopkins, personal communication. See also his Pecked and Painted: Rock Art from Long Meg to Giant Wallaroo, Peterborough: Langford Press, 2010.
p. 18 ‘Jill Cook, senior curator’: Jill Cook, personal communication, and Ice Age Art: The Arrival of the Modern Mind, London: British Museum Press, 2013.
p. 20 ‘The poet Kathleen Jamie’: Kathleen Jamie, Guardian, 16 February 2013.
p. 20 ‘When Paul Bahn and Joyce Tyldesley’: Joyce A. Tyldesley and Paul G. Bahn, ‘Use of Plants in the European Palaeolithic. A Review of the Evidence’, Quaternary Science Reviews, Vol. 2, 1983, pp. 53–81.
p. 23 ‘The first botanic gardens’: Early botanic gardens: see John Prest, The Garden of Eden: The Botanic Garden and the Re-creation of Paradise, New Haven, Conn., London: Yale University Press, 1981.
p. 26 ‘D. H. Lawrence, continuing’: D. H. Lawrence, Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
p. 27 ‘John Berger has written’: John Berger, ‘Painting and Time’, The White Bird: Writings by John Berger, ed. Lloyd Spencer, London: Chatto & Windus, 1985.
p. 28 ‘I’d met Tony Evans’: Tony Evans’s career: Tony Evans: Taking his Time, ed. David Gibbs, David Hillman and Caroline Edwards, London: Booth-Clibborn, 1998.
p. 30 ‘collaborate on a book’: Our book, The Flowering of Britain, was published London: Hutchinson, 1980, and made into a BBC documentary two years later.
p. 34 ‘The concept of ancient woodland’: Ancient woodland: see Oliver Rackham’s work, e.g. Trees and Woodland in the British Landscape, London: J. M. Dent, 1976; Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and uses in England, London: Edward Arnold, 1980; Woodlands, London: Collins, 2006.
p. 38 ‘On 24 April 1802’: Early records of the daffodil: A Seventeenth Century Flora of Cumbria: William Nicolson’s Catalogue of Plants, 1690, ed. E. Jean Whitaker, Durham: Surtees Society, 1981; Dorothy Wordsworth’s journal from Home at Grasmere: Extracts from the Journal of Dorothy Wordsworth (Written Between 1800 and 1803) and from the Poems of William Wordsworth, ed. Colette Clark, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960.
p. 38 ‘The Glow-worm Rock primrose’: Molly Maureen Mahood, The Poet as Botanist, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. For a fuller account of the life-story of ‘the primrose of the rocks’, see Lucy Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth: ‘All in Each Other’, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Wooden Manikins: the Cults of Trees
p. 41 ‘It’s on a Sumerian seal’: Sumerian seal: Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: The Evolution of an Image, London: Penguin, 1993.
p. 42 ‘As for the Tree of Life’: ‘Trees of Life: see Marina Warner, ‘Signs of the Fifth Element’, catalogue for The Tree of Life touring exhibition, South Bank Centre, 1989.
p. 42 ‘In the early 1970s’: Allen Meredith: see Anand Chetan and Diana Brueton, The Sacred Yew, London: Arkana, 1994.
p. 48 ‘If the Yew be set’: Robert Turner, Botanologia the British Physician, 1664.
p. 48 ‘A German medical professor’: Dr Kukowka’s experiments are quoted in Edred Thorsson, Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic, York Beach, Me.: Weiser, 1984.
p. 49 ‘Anglo-Saxon boundary descriptions’: Anglo-Saxon boundary trees: see Rackham, Trees and Woodland, op. cit.
p. 50 ‘But the yew which trumps’: Fortingall yew modern mythology: see Chetan and Brueton, Sacred Yew, op. cit.
p. 54 ‘What can be more pleasant’: John Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae, London, 1669.
p. 54 ‘The Fortingall yew was’: Fortingall yew early measurements: see Jacob George Strutt, Sylva Britannica, or Portraits of Forest Trees, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown and Green, 1830, Gilbert White, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, London, 1789; Patrick Neill, quoted in Chetan and Brueton, Sacred Yew, op. cit.
p. 58 ‘in the centre of the original tree’: J. E. Bowman, ‘On the Longevity of the Yew’, Magazine of Natural History, NS 1, 1832, 28–35.
p. 58 ‘But the weight’: John White, ‘Estimating the Age of Large and Veteran Trees in Britain’, Information Note, Forestry Commission, November 1998.
4. The Rorschach Tree: Baobab
p. 65 ‘At Ifaty on Madagascar’: Famous baobabs: see Thomas Pakenham, The Remarkable Baobab, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004; Michel Adanson, Histoire naturelle du Sénégal, Paris, 1757.
p. 69 ‘The West African writer’: Seydou Drame, quoted in Pakenham, The Remarkable Baobab, op. cit.
The Big Trees: Sequoias
p. 72 ‘In the New World’: Sequoia history: see James Mason Hutchings, Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California, 4th edn, San Francisco, 1870; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, London: HarperCollins, 1995.
p. 73 ‘It is to the happy accident’: Josiah Dwight Whitney Jr, The Yosemite Book, New York: Julius Bien, 1868.
p. 73 ‘Another writer’: Charles Fenno Hoffman, quoted in Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, New Haven, Conn., London: Yale University Press, 1967.
p. 76 ‘In 1901 another American’: Details of the Roosevelt-Muir meeting in John Muir, Nature Writings, ed. William Cronon, New York: Library of America, 1997, Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, London: Penguin, 2015.
6. Methuselahs: Bristlecones and Date Palms
p. 79 ‘In the 1960s a Michigan’: David Milarch’s story and a discussion of ‘Champion Trees’ is in Jim Robbins, The Man Who Plants Trees, New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012.
p. 80 ‘The longest proved dormancy’: Date-seed dormancy: see Thor Hanson, The Triumph of Seeds, New York: Basic Books, 2015.
p. 82 ‘The answer given’: Chris Walters quoted in Hanson, Triumph of Seeds, op. cit.
7. Provenance and Extinction: Wood’s Cyad
p. 88 ‘an Eden of the remote past’: Oliver Sacks, The Island of the Colour-blind, London: Picador, 1996.
8. From Workhorse to Green Man: The Oak
p. 90 ‘Historical ecologist’: Oliver Rackham and A.T. Grove, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: An Ecological History, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.
p. 91 ‘William Bryant Logan’: William Bryant Logan, Oak: The Frame of Civilization, New York, London: W. W. Norton, 2005.
p. 92 ‘as Rackhan remarks’: Rackham, Trees and Woodlands, op. cit.
p. 92 ‘The naval historian’: John Charnock, A History of Marine Architecture, 3 vols, London: R. Faulder, 1800–1802.
p. 96 ‘If I’d had more’: Form and pattern in tree growth, see: Philip Ball, The Self-made Tapestry: Pattern Formation in Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999; D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961.
p. 97 ‘In 2011, the French physicist’: Christophe Eloy, and a discussion of fractals in plant growth, in Will Benson, Kingdom of Plants: A Journey through Their Evolution, London: Collins, 2012.
p. 105 ‘Yet the remarkable passages’: John Ruskin, ‘Of Leaf Beauty’, Modern Painters, Vol. IV, Part V, 1856.
Myths of Cultivation
10. The Celtic Bush: Hazel
p. 110 ‘short distances and definite places’: Auden quotation from his poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’, 1948.
p. 113 ‘Oliver Rackham’s more persuasive’: Rackham’s view of the ‘Elm Decline’: see Woodlands, op. cit.
p. 114 ‘One modern hazel worker’: Hazel worker: Mark Powell, quoted in Richard Mabey, Flora Britannica, London: Sinclair Stevenson, 1996.
p. 118 ‘You could see the expansive’: Irish hazel names: see Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees: Myths, Legends and Folklore, Wilton, Co. Cork: Collins Press, 2003.
p. 119 ‘The Burren’s great biographer’: Tim Robinson, The Burren: A Map of the Uplands of North-west Clare, Eire, Roundstone, Co. Galway: Folding Landscapes, 1977.
p. 120 ‘the greenwood that hangs’: E. Charles Nelson and Wendy F. Walsh, The Burren: A Companion to the World of Flowers, Kilkenny: Boethius Press, 1991.
p. 121 ‘always [as] an emblem’: Adrian Harris, quoted in Mabey, Flora Britannica, op. cit.
p. 121 ‘The story whose compact’: Hazel mythology: see Coitir, Irish Trees, op. cit.
10. The Vegetable Lamb: Cotton
p. 122 ‘There growth there’: Sir John Mandeville, quotation from an 1839 facsimile by J. O. Halliwell of a 1725 transcription of The Voiage and Travaile of Sir John Maundevile, London: Edward Lumley, 1839.
p. 123 ‘More than two centuries’: Historical quotations taken from Henry Lee, The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: A Curious Fable of the Cotton Plant, London: Sampson, Low & Co., 1887.
p. 125 ‘A more plausible explanation’: Sir Hans Sloane, Remark on a Letter of George Dampier, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 20, 1 January 1698, 52.
p. 126 ‘I have to express’: Lee, Vegetable Lamb, op. cit.
p. 128 ‘To speake of the commodities’: John Gerard, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, 1597, Thomas Johnson revised edn, 1636 (in a New York: Dover facsimile, 1975).
p. 128 ‘There are four members’: History of cotton: see Edgar Anderson, Plants, Man and Life, London: Andrew Melrose, 1954, new edn Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
p. 130 ‘In the heyday of spiritualism’: Cotton in séances: see Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors and Media into the Twenty-first Century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
p. 131 ‘But enduring myths’: Richard Holloway, personal communication, and ‘How to Film the Bible’, Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2014.
p. 132 ‘The great biological essayist’: Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher, New York: Viking Press, 1974.
11. The Staff of Life: Maize
p. 133 ‘The myths of corn’s origin’: Myths of maize origins: see John E. Staller, Robert H. Tykot Bruce F. Benz, Histories of Maize in Mesoamerica. Multidisciplinary Approaches, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press, 2010.
p. 133 ‘So too are the group of stories’: Claude Lévi-Strauss, From Honey to Ashes, 1966, trans. John George and Doreen Weightman, London: Cape, 1973. For more maize origin myths see also his The Raw and the Cooked, 1964, trans. John George and Doreen Weightman, first UK edn London: Cape, 1970.
p. 136 ‘These early maize ears’: Maize evolution: see Stoller et al., Histories of Maize, op. cit.; Anderson, Plants, Man and Life, op cit. See also Oliver Sacks, Oaxaca Journal, Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2001.
p. 137 ‘Forest gardening’: Forest gardens: see Anderson, Plants, Man and Life, op. cit.; Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Forest Within: The World-view of the Tukano Amazonian Indians, Totnes: Themis, 1996.
p. 139 ‘During the mid twentieth century’: Anderson, Plants, Man and Life, 1967, op. cit.
p. 141 ‘If this were a story’: Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock, San Francisco: Freeman, 1983.
12. The Panacea: Ginseng
p. 143 ‘That a genus’: Ginseng history: see Barbara Griggs, New Green Pharmacy: The History of Western Herbal Medicine, 2nd edn, London: Vermilion, 1997; Andrew Dalby, ‘Ginseng: Taming the Wild’, Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2004: Wild Food, London; Prospect Books, 2006.
p. 145 ‘In the complex mythology’: Tukano uacú ritual: see Reichel-Dolmatoff, Forest Within, op. cit.
p. 145 ‘In the redoubts’: Appalachian indigenous medicine: see Anthony Cavender, Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia, Chapel Hill, NC, London: University of North Carolina, 2003.
p. 148 ‘Chimpanzees with infections’: Self-medication in animals: see Hanson, Triumph of Seeds, op. cit.
p. 150 ‘tell the visionary’: Reichel-Dolmatoff, The Forest Within, 1966, op. cit.
p. 150 ‘Amongst the Runa people’: Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
p. 153 ‘The Cherokee believed’: Cherokee beliefs: see Cavender, Folk Medicine, op cit.
p. 154 ‘It gives an uncommon’: William Byrd quoted in Griggs, New Green Pharmacy, op cit.
p. 155 ‘Whole communities turned’: Ginseng in US community life and economy: see Euell Gibbons, Stalking the Healthful Herbs, New York: McKay, 1966; Cavender, Folk Medicine, op. cit; Kristin Johannsen, Ginseng Dreams. The Secret World of America’s Most Valuable Plant, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2006.
13. The Vegetable Mudfish: Samphire
p. 160 ‘Diligent botanist’: V. J. Chapman, ‘Studies in Salt-marsh Ecology, Parts I–III’, Journal of Ecology, Vol. 26, 1938, 144–79.
The Shock of the Real: Scientists and Romantics
p. 164 ‘It would be easy’: Wilfrid Blunt, The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus, London: W. Collins, 1971.
p. 165 ‘I love to see the nightingale’: John Clare’s Journal in Margaret Grainger, ed., The Natural History Prose Writings of John Clare, Oxford: Clarendon, 1983; Marilyn Gaull, ‘Clare and “the Dark System”’, in John Clare in Context, ed. Hugh Haughton, Adam Phillips and Geoffrey Summerfield, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
p. 166 ‘In 1817, at a very lively’: Haydon’s 1817 party: Nicholas Roe, John Keats: A New Life, New Haven, Conn., London: Yale University Press, 2012.
14. Life versus Entropy: Newton’s Apple
p. 167 ‘After dinner, the weather’: William Stukeley, Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, 1752.
p. 171 ‘At the start of the twenty-first century’: Barrie E. Juniper and David J. Mabberley, The Story of the Apple, Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 2006. p. 169 ‘In the United States’ Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript, ed. Bradley P. Dean, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
p. 171 ‘And in 1841’: Story of ‘Lane’s Prince Albert’: see Francesca Greenoak, Forgotten Fruit: the English Orchard and Fruit Garden, London: Deutsch, 1983; Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, The New Book of Apples, revised edn, London: Ebury, 2002.
p. 172 ‘The work eventually ran’: The Herefordshire Pomona is available on a CD, published by the Marcher Apple Network, 2005.
15. Intimations of Photosynthesis: Mint and Cucumber
p. 176 ‘The nature of air obsessed’: Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men; The Friends who Made the Future, 1730–1810, London: Faber, 2002.
p. 176 ‘Priestley had been experimenting’: Joseph Priestley, Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air, London, 1775. For the full history of the discovery of photosynthesis, see Oliver Morton, Eating the Sun: The Everyday Miracle of How Plants Power the Planet, London: Fourth Estate, 2007.
p. 178 ‘In 1727 Stephen Hales’: Stephen Hales, Vegetable Staticks, or, an Account of Some Statical Experiments on the Sap in Vegetables, London: W. & J. Innys, 1727.
p. 180 ‘I hope this will give’: Benjamin Franklin’s letter quoted in Priestley, Experiments, op. cit.
p. 183 ‘The atom of charcoal’: Shirley Hibberd, Brambles and Bay Leaves: Essays on the Homely and the Beautiful, London, 1855.
p. 183 ‘It’s a passage’: Primo Levi, The Periodic Table, 1975.
16. The Challenge of Carnivorous Plants: The Tipitiwitchet
p. 184 ‘This letter quoted’: E. Charles Nelson, Aphrodite’s Mousetrap: A Biography of Venus’s Flytrap, Boethius Press, 1990. I am indebted to this book for much of the detail of the flytrap’s early history.
p. 185 ‘It put the usefulness’: For an attack on argument by analogy see Philip C. Ritterbush, Overtures to Biology: The Speculations of Eighteenth-Century Naturalists, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964.
p. 189 ‘Excuse me if in vanity’: William Logan’s Ms letter is in the Aberdeen University Library.
p. 190 ‘This is a footnote’: Erasmus Darwin, The Botanic Garden, London: J. Johnson, 1791. See also Molly Mahood’s discussion of Erasmus in The Poet as Botanist, op. cit.
p. 191 ‘In December 1990’: Daniel L. McKinley, quoted in Nelson, Aphrodite’s Mousetrap, op. cit.
p. 192 ‘It’s gratifying to see’: Barry A. Rice, Growing Carnivorous Plants, Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 2006.
p. 192 ‘In 1968, secondary school’: Isle of Man teenagers: quoted in Mabey, Flora Britannica, op. cit.
p. 193 ‘During the summer of 1860’: Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants, London, 1875.
p. 196 ‘He was thrilled’: Research on the electrical activity in the Venus flytrap, in Daniel Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses of Your Garden – and Beyond, Richmond: One World, 2012.
17. Wordsworth’s Daffodils
p. 198 ‘the world’s most popular spring flower’: Noel Kingsbury and Jo Whitworth, The Remarkable Story of the World’s Most Popular Spring Flower, Portland, Ore.: Timber Press, 2013.
p. 200 ‘He wrote his famous’: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, translation by Rolfe Humphries, London: John Calder, 1955.
p. 201 ‘The Elizabethan botanical writer’: Gerard, Herball, op. cit.
p. 201 ‘The first written’: William Turner, A New Herball, London: Steven Mierdman, 1551.
p. 201 ‘And it had vernacular’: Local daffodil names: Geoffrey Grigson, The Englishman’s Flora, London: Phoenix House, 1955.
p. 201 ‘When the Belgian botanist’: Charles de l’Écluse, quoted in Carolus Clusius, Rariorum Plantarum Historia, 1601.
p. 203 ‘Ted Hughes, in his superb poem’: Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.
p. 204 ‘From Marcle Way’: Lascelles Abercrombie poem, in Sean Street, The Dymock Poets: Poetry, Place and Memory, Bridgend: Seren Books, 1998.
p. 206 ‘We fancied that the lake’: Dorothy Wordsworth, in Clark, ed., Grasmere Journal, op. cit.
p. 207 ‘Lucy Newlyn, in her brilliantly’ Newlyn, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, op. cit.
18. On Being Pollinated: Keats’s Forget-Me-Not
p. 209 ‘The Revd Richard Polwhele agreed’: Revd Polwhele, quoted in Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks, Cambridge: Icon, 2003.
p. 210 ‘Nor can I find’: Quotations from Keats’s poems are from John Keats: The Major Works, ed. Elizabeth Cook, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
p. 211 ‘Thirty years previously’: Joseph Kölreuter and Christian Sprengle: see Michael Proctor and Peter Yeo, The Pollination of Flowers, London: Collins, 1973.
p. 211 ‘The ever-imaginative’: Erasmus Darwin, ‘The Economy of Vegetation’, The Botanic Garden, London: J. Johnson, 1791.
p. 212 ‘[He] experimented with’: Patrick Blair, Botanick Essays, London: W. & J. Innys, 1720.
p. 212 ‘Now if the Bee’: Arthur Dobbs, ‘Concerning Bees and Their Method of Gathering Wax and Honey’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 46, 1750, 536–49.
p. 213 ‘Experiments involving scent’: Insects’ colour preferences: see Proctor and Yeo, Pollination, op. cit.
p. 215 ‘Did Keats suspect any’: Keat’s life: see Roe, John Keats, op. cit.; Robert Gittings, John Keats, London: Heinemann, 1968.
p. 215 ‘It has been an old Comparison’: Letter to John Reynolds, quoted in Gittings, John Keats, op. cit.
p. 217 ‘Modern writers such as’: For a robust defence of Romantic vitalism, see Denise Gigante, Life: Organic Form and Romanticism, New Haven, Conn., London: Yale University Press, 2009; David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution, London: Bloomsbury, 2011; Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-eye View of the World, London: Bloomsbury, 2002.
p. 218 ‘[These] are the real’: John Ruskin, Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, 2 vols., Orpington: George Allen, 1875–6.
New Lands, New Visions
p. 220 ‘I reported my friend’: David Nash exhibition at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2012.
p. 221 ‘One by one the plants’: Mary- Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 1992.
p. 221 ‘The natural-history artist’: Kim Todd, Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, London: I. B. Tauris, 2007. See also the chapter on Merian in Natalie Zemon Davis, Women in the Margins: Three Seventeenth-century Lives, Cambridge, Mass.. London: Harvard University Press, 1995.
19. Jewels of the Desert: Francis Masson’s Starfish and Birds of Paradise
p. 224 ‘For Britain’s first official’: For Masson’s life, see a series of papers by M. C. Karsten in the Journal of South African Botany, Vols. 24–7, 1958–61.
p. 252 ‘This tract of country’: Francis Masson, ‘An Account of Three Journeys from the Cape Town into the Southern Parts of Africa’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Vol. 66, 1776, 319–52.
20. Growing Together: The East India Company’s Fusion Art
p. 232 ‘India had been colonised’: Company art: see Mildred Archer, ‘India and Natural History: The Role of the East India Company, 1785–1858’, History Today, Vol. 9, No. 11, Nov. 1959, 736–43; also her Indian Painting for the British, 1770–1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955.
p. 238 ‘The clear, blue, cloudless’: William Hodges, Travels in India, London, 1793.
21. The Chiaroscuro: The Impressionists’ Olive Trees
p. 240 ‘The olive tree is’: Aldous Huxley, The Olive Tree and Other Essays, London: Chatto & Windus, 1936.
p. 240 ‘The first detailed painting’: Stephen Harris, The Magnificent Flora Graeca: How the Mediterranean Came to the English Garden, Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007.
p. 241 ‘He painted them’: Van Gogh quotes from Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life, London: Profile Books, 2011.
p. 241 ‘It sparkles like diamonds’: Derek Fell, Renoir’s Garden, London: F. Lincoln, 1991.
p. 244 ‘For a long while’: For a scholarly demolition of the ‘Ruined Landscape’ myth see Rackham and Grove, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe, op. cit.
22. Local Distinctiveness: Cornfield Tulips and Horizontal Flax
p. 247 ‘We gathered the Ebony’: John Sibthorp, quoted in Harris, The Magnificent Flora Graeca, op. cit.
p. 249 ‘Other Cretan endemics’: John Fielding and Nicholas Turland, Flowers of Crete, London: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 2005.
p. 250 ‘What is Samaria’: Antonis Albertis, The Gorge of Samaria and its Plants, Heraklion, 1994
p. 251 ‘Their special botanical’: Chasmophytes: see S. Snogerup, ‘Evolutionary and Plant Geographical Aspects of Chasmophytic Communities’, Plant Life of South-West Asia, ed. Peter H. Davis, Peter C. Harper and Ian C. Hedge, Edinburgh: Botanical Society of Edinburgh, 1971
p. 252 ‘John Fielding’s phtographs’: Fielding and Turland, Flowers of Crete, op. cit.
The Victorian Plant Theatre
p. 253 ‘Predicted by Newton’s prism’: Glass: see Isobel Armstrong. Victorian Glassworlds. Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830–1880, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
p. 253 ‘Nathaniel Ward was a doctor’: Nathaniel Ward: see David Elliston Allen, The Victorian Fern Craze: A History of Pteridomana, London: Hutchinson, 1969; Nicolette Scourse, The Victorians and Their Flowers, London: Croom Helm, 1983.
p. 257 ‘Gleaming rock crystals’: Kate Colquhoun, A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary Life of Joseph Paxton, London: Fourth Estate, 2003.
23. ‘Vegetable jewellery’: The Fern Craze
p. 258 ‘The eruption of interest’: Pteridomania: see Allen, Victorian Fern Craze, op cit.; Edward Newman, A History of British Ferns and Allied Plants, London: John van Voorst, 1840.
24. ‘The Queen of Lilies’: Victoria amazonica
p. 264 ‘The first European’: Early discoveries of Victoria amazonica: Tomasz Anisko, Victoria: The Seductress, Kennett Square, Pa.: Longwood Gardens, 2013.
p. 265 ‘Robert (eventually Sir Robert)’: Robert Schomburgk: see account in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, Vol. 73, 1846.
p. 267 ‘The war of spin’: Dispute over name and early flowerings: see Wilfrid Blunt, In for a Penny: A Prospect of Kew Gardens: Their Flora, Fauna and Falballas, London: Hamilton, Tryon Gallery, 1978; and Anisko, Victoria, op. cit.
p. 269 ‘the lily enterprise’: Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, op. cit.
p. 271 ‘The impression of the plant’: Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon & Andes, London: Macmillan, 1908.
p. 272 ‘Several expensive folios’: Walter Fitch, Victoria Regia, or, Illustrations of the Royal Waterlily, London, 1851.
p. 274 ‘You will observe that nature’: Colquhuon, A Thing in Disguise, op. cit.
25. A Sarawakan Stinkbomb: The Titan Arum
p. 276 ‘The single flower’: Beccari. An account of the discovery and flowering of the Titan arum is in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, Vol. 117, 1891.
p. 276 ‘When David Attenborough filmed’: David Attenborough, interview in Daily Telegraph, 28 October 2008.
p. 279 ‘For twenty happy years’: The story of Hardings Wood is in Richard Mabey, Home Country, London: Century, 1990, and Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees, London: Chatto & Windus, 2007 (revised pbk edn The Ash and the Beech: The Drama of Woodland Change, London: Vintage Books, 2013).
p. 280 ‘In that first year’: Richard Mabey, Nature Cure, London: Chatto & Windus, 2005.
p. 281 ‘And in a fen’: J. E. Lousley: see Victor Samuel Summerhayes, Wild Orchids of Britain, 2nd edn, London: Collins, 1969.
p. 282 ‘Unsuprisingly, it was never seen’: Rediscovery of Sander’s slipper orchid: see Eric Hansen, Orchid Fever: A Horticultural Tale of Love, Lust and Lunacy, London: Methuen, 2000.
p. 285 ‘They resembled a clog’: Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, 1884.
p. 285 ‘H. G. Wells wrote a brisk’: H. G. Wells, ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’, The Works of H. G. Wells, Atlantic Edition, Vol. I, The Time Machine, The Wonderful Visit, and Other Stories, London: T. Fisher Unwin.1924.
p. 285 ‘At the start of Raymond Chandler’s’: Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, 1939. For an overview of orchids in fiction: see Potter, Seven Flowers, op. cit.
p. 287 ‘The gardener Philp Miller’: Philip Miller, Gardeners’ Dictionary,, 4th edn, London, 1740.
p. 288 ‘It is symmetrically’: Maurice Maeterlinck, The Intelligence of Flowers, 1907, translated by Philip Mosley, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2008;. For a discussion of orchid mimicry, see H. Martin Schaefer and Graeme D. Ruxton, Plant-Animal Communication, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
p. 297 ‘“Nice lip,” ventured’: Hansen, Orchid Fever, op. cit.
p. 297 ‘No wonder John Ruskin’: Ruskin, Proserpina, op. cit.
p. 298 ‘Their forms are beyond’: Charlotte Mary Yonge, The Herb of the Field, London, 1853.
p. 300 ‘The story of its subsequent’: Rediscovery of Cattleya labiata vera, in Tyler Whittle, The Plant Hunters: 3450 Years of Searching for Green Treasure, London: Heinemann, 1970.
p. 303 ‘fresh air and the winds’: Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 2 vols., London: John Murray, 1854.
p. 306 ‘in a state of some’: Martin Sanford, A Flora of Suffolk, Ipswich: D. K. & M. N. Sandford, 2010.
p. 308 ‘In 2014 the journal’: Boquila: see E. Gianoli and F. Carrusco-Urra, ‘Leaf Mimicry in a Climbing Plant Protects against Herbivory’, Current Biology, Vol. 24, no. 9, 5 May, 2014, 984–7.
27. The Butterfly Effect: The Moonflower
p. 311 ‘In 1972 the English artist’: For Margaret Mee’s life and journals, see Margaret Mee, In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests, ed. Tony Morrison, Nonesuch Expeditions, 1988, and Mee, Flowers of the Brazilian Forest, London: Tryon Gallery in association with George Rainbird, 1968.
p. 321 ‘But in the mid 1990s’: W. Barthlott, S. Porembski, M. Kluge, J. Hopke and L. Schmidt, ‘Selenicereus wittii (Cactaceae: An Epiphyte Adapted to Amazonian Igapó Inundation Forests’, Plant Systematics and Evolution, Vol. 206, No. ¼, 1997, 175–86.
p. 321 ‘They are typical’: ‘white-floral-image’ see Roma Kaiser, The Scent of Orchids: Olfactory and Chemical Investigations, Elsevier, 1993.
28. The Canopy Cooperative: Air Plants and Bromeliads
p. 323 ‘One of the Amazonian’: Mee, Brazilian Forests, op cit.; Margaret Mee and Lyman B. Smith, The Bromeliads: Jewels of the Tropics, South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes; London: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969.
p. 324 ‘They build up symbioses’: Rainforest symbioses: see Schaeffer and Ruxton, Plant-Animal Communication, op. cit.; Benson, Kingdom of Plants, op. cit.
p. 325 ‘One modern journalist’: Charles C. Mann, ‘1491’, The Atlantic, March 2002.
p. 325 ‘Mark W. Moffett, a Harvard’: Mark W. Moffett, The High Frontier: Exploring the Tropical Rainforest Canopy, Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 1993.
p. 327 ‘Instead of climbing’: Canopy rafts: see Adrian Bell, ‘On the Roof of the Rainforest’, New Scientist, 2 February 1991.
p. 327 ‘This is a useful corrective’: Amazonia as a human artefact: see the arguments between Betty J. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, Chicago: Aldine Atherton, 1971, and Anna C. Roosevelt, Moundbuilders of the Amazon, San Diego, London: Academic Press, 1991.
29. Plant Intelligence: Mimosa
p. 331 ‘John Freke, an English John Freke, Essay to Shew the Cause of Electricity, London, 1746.
p. 331 ‘George Bell, in 1776’: George Bell, quoted in Ritterbush, Overtures to Biology, op. cit., which contains an overview (rather hostile) of the use of analogy in eighteenth-century botany.
p. 331 ‘So sinks or rises’: Erasmus Darwin, Loves of Plants, op. cit.
p. 332 ‘When the sequence of events’: Mechanism of mimosa’s folding: see Dov Koller, The Restless Plant, Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2011; Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows, op cit. Monica Gagliano’s mimosa experiment, see Michael Pollan, ‘The Intelligent Plant’, The New Yorker, 23 December 2013.
p. 335 ‘chemical communication between plants’: Plant-plant communication: see Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, Verde Brilliante: Sensibilata e intelligenza del mondo vegetale, Florence, 2013; Schaefer and Ruxton, Plant-Animal Communication, op. cit. mopane trees; Colin Tudge, The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter, London: Allen Lane, 2005.
p. 335 ‘of the University’: Suzanne Simard’s research outlined in Pollan, ‘The Intelligent Plant’, op. cit.
p. 336 ‘But sound communication’: E.g. Monica Gagliano, ‘Green Symphonies: A Call for Studies on Acoustic Communication in Plants’, Behavioral Ecology, Vol. 24, No. 4, 2013, 789–96; M. Gagliano and M. Renton, ‘Love Thy Neighbour: Facilitation through an Alternative Signalling Modality in Plants’, BMC Ecology, Vol. 13, May 2013.
p. 337 ‘The idea that’: Daniel Dennett quoted in Pollan, ‘The Intelligent Plant’, op cit. For discussions of vegetal intelligence, see ‘The Aware Plant’ in Chamovitz, What a Plant Knows, op. cit., and Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking. A Philosophy of Vegetal Life, New York, Chichester; Columbia University Press, 2013.
Epilogue
p. 339 ‘Forty years after’: A new edition of Beechcombings has been published as The Ash and the Beech: The Drama of Woodland Change, London: Vintage Books, 2013.