The Origin Of Plants

Maggie Campbell-Culver

Editions

Review

As Nicky Haslam so cruelly commented about Joan Collin’s weddings, “You wait for ages for one to arrive, then three come one after another!”  So it seems with books about where our garden plants come from, and Maggie Campbell-Culver’s is surely the pick of the crop.

The title, a crib from Darwin, is actually a tad misleading, and although unwieldy, the subtitle (‘The People and Plants that have shaped Britain’s Garden History since the Year 1000’) gives a much better idea of the contents.  In eleven chapters, one for each century and one for the preceding millennium, Campbell-Culver packs in a tremendous number of facts, opinions, lores and conjectures which must have been difficult to select and organise.  Wisely, she explains her system.  Chronological chapters begin with a list of significant contemporary events, to put the plant introductions into context, and she has chosen to give the full historical information in the order of their arrival, which may not always make for stylistic flow, but it certainly avoids repetition.  Dates tend to become more precise the further we move forward in time, as herbalists’ records became source material for scholars, and the journals of adventurers and plant-hunters from our Imperial past took hold of the imaginations and mercenary instincts of an increasingly avid public.

The particulars are fascinating.  Did you know that Wallflowers and Pinks came in the grouting material used by William The Conqueror?  Or that Cannabis, originating in India, was used medicinally in Britain in the 14th Century?  Nobody played ‘conkers’ until 1616, some of the London Planes in Berkeley Square are the originals planted in 1789 on the site of a plague pit, suburbia might have been quite different if the ‘Monkey Puzzle’ tree hadn’t arrived from Chile in 1789, and the myriad forms of Cornus kousa var. chinense we enjoy in our gardens have all been developed since Kingdom Ward sent some seeds from Assam in the 1950’s.

There’s great stuff in here with masses of illustrations to supplement the text, from the Wilton Dyptich, via Culpepper’s herbals, to a design by Anthony Holland for a ‘carrot costume’ for Stanley Baxter… - review by Stewart Grimshaw