BOTANICAL REVELATION: EUROPEAN ENCOUNTERS WITH AUSTRALIAN PLANTS BEFORE DARWIN
by David J Mabberley
NewSouth Books, £51.95 ISBN 978-1742236476
A lavish, scholarly book that looks at the work of the European botanical pioneers who first discovered the plants of Australasia.
Reviewer Rory Dusoir is a Kew-trained gardener and writer.
Botanical Revelation is a hugely impressive endeavour by renowned academic and field botanist David Mabberley, a name familiar to all students of botany for his standard reference work The Plant Book. His latest work draws heavily (but by no means exclusively) on Peter Crossing’s globally important collection of antiquarian books and botanical paintings, and as such includes facsimiles of a good deal of previously unpublished source material.
The story he tells is both minutely detailed and of huge weight. The adventures of Joseph Banks, James Cook, William Dampier et al, in Australasia have had vast geo-political consequences, but the author also rightly focuses on the impact to contemporary culture and imagination of exposure to Australia’s flora and fauna, the ‘otherness’ of which was a huge stimulus to European science and horticulture, culminating in the theory of evolution. The influence of the European discovery of Australia on gardening in the west has been somewhat eclipsed by the subsequent exploration of China, and as such is in danger of being overlooked in modern accounts of plant hunting. This book firmly re-establishes its importance. It also graphically brings to the forefront the centrality of botany and of botanical illustration to the story of European colonialism.
Botanical Revelation is not light reading. The book is so densely packed with knowledge and incident that you may need a large pot of coffee and the company of several reference books to make the most of it. But the text is leavened unstintingly with botanical illustrations (the beautifully thorough work of Ferdinand Bauer being a highlight) and with facsimiles of historical herbarium specimens, which bring a particular immediacy to the account; all efforts to delve into this book will be more than amply repaid.