Planting Paradise. Cultivating the Garden, 1501-1900. 2011. illus. 53 col. pls. 142 p. gr8vo. Hardcover.

The book charts the evolution of thinking about the cultivation ofgardens from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this age ofdiscovery, when the world was being explored as never before, gardeningitself took on new dimensions. The Renaissance belief in direct observation of nature offered an alternative way of thinking and inspired the scientific approach of the Enlightment, and soon gardenswere no longer just places of beauty, but also laboratories for scientific investigations. The book reveals how the botanic gardensof early modern Europe were largely viewed as a means of supplying surgeons with medicines but by the seventeenth and eighteenth century the interest in gardens and cultivating exotic plants had spread to all levels of society. As global exploration took Europeans all over the world, gardens became a tapestry of many diverse botanical histories, some plants were native, some were introduced from foreign lands, and others were bred in the garden.