Seize The Plant Hunters: Being An Examination Of Collecting, With An Account Of The Careers The Methods Of A Number Of Those Who Have Searched The World For Wild Plants Conceived By Tyler Whittle Distributed As Interactive EBook

Plant Hunters" gives every sign of having been thrown together by Tyler Whittle to boil a pot, Yet he was an enthusiast for his subject, so there are many signs of a good book trying to get out,

Nevertheless, is it than irritating, in a book about hunting plants, to read a page or two, sometimes , about a plant hunter without a hint of what plants he found.
No women plant hunters allowed,

This is definitely a book about the hunters and not the hunted, Hair's breadth escapes or failures to escape dominate the anecdotes, A great many plant hunters died in the field, typically falling off cliffs, but there were other ways, More than a couple were chopped up by Buddhist monks,

Rather about rather fewer hunters would have made for a better book, When Whittle does give a subject some elbow room, as he does with his nominee for greatest of all collectors, David Douglas, it still is not enough, About the only subject who gets just about the right amount of space seven pages is Nathanial Ward, who devised the Wardian case, although he was not a plant hunter himself but a GP in the East End of London.


This is an insubstantial work, suitable for idling away a few hours in the late winter when the seed catalogs have become dog eared,

It hardly seems to have earned a place in Horticulture magazine's Garden Classics, and the edition I have is anything but a classic, Reprinted, complete with howlers, from the plates of theedition, it includes two pages of acknowledgments

for permission to reprint illustrations but not the illustrations themselves,

If you are going to spend the time it takes to read this book, turn hunter yourself and find the original Chilton edition and give the Lyons Burford/Horticulture paperback reprint a miss.
The book is clear, concise and detailed in short everything for which I was searching, Good quality for price and a book very rich in content, Captivating reeding taking its start all the way back to Queen Hatchepsut's journey to PuntB, C to:th century explorers, Not nearly as interesting as I expected, The text is essentially lists of who found what, with a few bits about competition, It could have been much interesting than it was, Great read very interesting My SF Botanical Garden book club is reading this book! It's out of print, but was able to provide several reliable sources for it, It's a superb read, not the dry digging you might expect, but a keen telling of the stories, the history of the times, and the passionate characters who found and nurtured the plants to be shared with other enthusiasts.
We're reading it together with Glynis Ridley's "The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, " OK Now it is easy to have plants from all over the world available at your local nursery, This story shows what hard work, travel, trials, and disease and death were involved to get new plant species back to the UK or France to catalog and propagate the time frame is mostlys.
The men that T. Whittle describe are kind of like a Johnny Appleseed guy in reverseinstead of planting, they walked for years and hundreds of miles in foreign lands to dig up and name/document/pack and ship, sometimes all alone.
It truly had to be an obsession, For all their hard work, sometimes a plant gets the hunter's name, . very interesting I think about my garden in a different way now, I like Mr. Whittle's book for the diversity of plant hunters he portrays, There are some riveting and harrowing stories,

No doubt it is a daunting task to choose from the plethora of stories to be told by all the plant hunters history provides, Possibly overwhelmed, Mr. Whittle perhaps chose too many stories to portray, some of them sketchily and briefly, Still, it is what it is, and if you want to glimpse into the lives lived and spent tracking down plants for whimsy, medicine, horticulture, and agriculture, then you won't find your time too poorly spent.
Slime pits, bribery, jaguars, murderwhat would drive someone through such risks merely to find new plants From Queen Hatshepsut's expedition to the land of Punt inB, C. in search of frankincense, to recent botanical expeditions, here are the dramatic adventures of The Plant Hunters, We meet Pliny, Linnaeus, Sir Joseph Banks, Nathaniel Ward, and others and find out what they brought back and why, A fascinating collection for gardeners interested in how now familiar plants arrived in their gardens, and for anyone with a thirst for adventure and scientific discover, .