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Lectures at Chelsea Physic Garden
Lectures are open to Friends of the Garden. Tickets are free, limited to two per Friend and allocated on a first-come basis. Admission is via 66 Royal Hospital Road. Talks start promptly at 6.45pm in the upstairs Lecture Room which unfortunately is not accessible to wheelchair users.
Andrea Wulf, Wednesday 14 May at 6.45pm
To get you in the mood for the summer talks series, you are
invited to listen to Andrea Wulf talking about her latest book, 'The
Brother Gardeners. Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession'.
The Brother Gardeners is a group biography of explorers, botanists, collectors, and plant dealers: Philip Miller, Chelsea Physic Garden's most famous gardener and the author of the Gardeners Dictionary, the most important horticultural publication of all times; the collector and merchant Peter Collinson who together with the American farmer John Bartram ‘transplanted’America to England; Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who classified the natural world and invented a standardized botanical nomenclature, popularising botany as a genteel pastime for the middle-classes; Daniel Solander who ignored his teacher Linnaeus and joined the dashingly handsome Joseph Banks on Captain Cook’s Endeavour on the greatest voyage of discovery of modern times; and Banks himself, who exchanged his life as a rich gentlemen for that of an explorer, becoming in turn one of the most influential men in Georgian England.
Friends, rivals, enemies, their correspondence, collaborations and squabbles make for a riveting human story set against the backdrop of the emerging British empire. As botany and horticulture became a science, the garden became the Eden for everyman.
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Andrea Wulf is a writer and garden historian. She is the author of The Brother Gardeners. Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession and the co-author This Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She writes for The Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and The Garden. |
The Brother Gardeners was recently BBC's 'Book of the Week'. Published by William Heinemann at £18.99. Andrea will be selling signed copies of her book which is currently on sale in the Shop.
We are also holding a series of Lectures in July and August to mark our 25th anniversary of being open to the public. Click Here to find out more.