PUBLICATIONS
& THE WEB

THE INGENIOUS MR. FAIRCHILD: THE FORGOTTEN FATHER OF THE FLOWER GARDEN by MICHAEL LEAPMAN.

HEADLINE BOOK PUBLISHING, LONDON. 2000. 280 pp.

It is not often that a specimen from the Sloane Herbarium features as the image on the dust jacket of a popular book! But there is "Fairchild's mule", the hybrid of a sweet william (Dianthus barbatus L.) and a gillyflower (Dianthus caryophyllus L.), linen tapes and all - on the cover of this entertaining book about Thomas Fairchild, gardener extraordinaire in London in the late seventeenth century. The book is a history of gardening in early London, and in a way, a history of London itself. Fairchild's genius is set clearly in this context, and Leapman imaginatively and cleverly documents the way in which gardening and an appreciation of plants was popularized. I think Leapman does not really give men such as Sir Hans Sloane their due however - it is, after all, only because Sloane had a specimen of "Fairchild's mule" that we know it existed at all and can pin down the time of its creation. Herbaria are the lasting documentation of history, and as such, are resources to be valued.

The book ends with a discussion of the GM debate - which I have reviewed elsewhere (Knapp, 2000). Leapman quite rightly points out that although deeply religious and believers in God's design, Fairchild and his contemporaries were in no way sentimental about nature and her products. Thomas Fairchild would not have stopped to wonder whether or not we needed a blue rose, he probably would have set out to try to make one.

Knapp, S. 2000. Sex, leaves and rock and roll. Review of "The ingenious Mr. Fairchild: forgotten father of the flower garden". Nature 405: 885-886.

Sandra Knapp

A MONK AND TWO PEAS:THE STORY OF GREGOR MENDEL AND THE DISCOVERY OF GENETICS by ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG.

WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON, LONDON. 2000. 278 pp.

Every biologist (and every schoolchild for that matter) has been taught the story of Gregor Mendel - Austrian monk who bred peas and discovered the principles of inheritance by looking at flower and seed colour. We also all know that his work lay undiscovered and unnoticed until early in the 20th Century, and that if Charles Darwin had known about Mendel's pea experiments, many of the mysteries of how evolution by natural selection worked would have been solved at a stroke. Well, this book is the story behind the story we all know - a tale of patience, idiosyncracy, hard work and academic jealousy.

Gregor Mendel was a lucky man - a peculiar and sickly child, he found a comfortable niche in the monastery at Brnn, where academic pursuits were encouraged and his "mania" for plant breeding supported, both financially and physically. The mid-19th Century was a time of great change in the sciences, particularly in biology. Old ideas about the fixity of nature were being questioned, and the interface between science and religion was changing fast. Act One of Henig's drama is the life and times of Mendel himself. Mendel worked on peas for decades, crossing strains with particular characters in combination and singly. His crossings were the logical extension of Thomas Fairchild's hybridization experiments - by the time Mendel was alive, the fact that plants had sex like animals was well established. He sent his Pisum L., paper to the famous botanist Carl von Ngeli, who suggested that his results were weak and that he continue his experiments, but using a different plant.

The plants von Ngeli suggested were hawkweeds in the genus Hieracium L. - now well-known for their complex interplay of apomixis and hybridization. What a terrible suggestion! Was it deliberate and inspired by von Ngeli's jealousy? Mendel ruined his eyesight working with Hieracium, and made no further progress. He became disillusioned with his science and stopped corresponding with his peers. However it does not all end in tragedy, Mendel ended his days as the abbot of the monastery, collecting jokes and being loved for his gentleness and good humour.

Most of us don't get an Act Two to our lives - but Mendel did. Act Two of Mendel's story also has at its centre controversy and professional jealousy - this time between scientists working separately but "rediscovering" Mendel's work at more or less the same time. William Bateson and Raphael Weldon of Cambridge, Hugo de Vries of Amsterdam and Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia University were all larger than life characters - and Henig skillfully tells their interlocking stories, rife with jealousy and controversy. The lives of men were as interesting as their science, and the weaving together of strands of high excitement and tragic loss which all of these men experienced makes their science all that much more thrilling. This is a book to inspire those not yet captivated by genetics to take a closer look, and to show those who characterize genetics as inherently evil another side of the coin. As with Leapman's book, Henig concludes with a brief look at the genetic modification debate - and reminds us all that there is no such thing as a harmless putterer working quietly in a monastery garden, all of our actions to increase knowledge have consequences, sometimes good, sometimes bad. But to deny the pursuit of knowledge would be tragedy indeed - worse even than Hieracium!

Sandra Knapp

MEDIEVAL HERBALS, THE ILLUSTRATIVE TRADITIONS by MINTA COLLINS

THE BRITISH LIBRARY AND UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS, 2000. 334pp.

For many people herbals are epitomised by the works of Gerard and Culpeper but their history predates these gentlemen by a very long time. This book deals with a group of herbal texts of the 14th and 15th Centuries and the influence on them of even earlier Greek, Arabic and Latin works. Carefully researched and clearly the result of considerable labour, the book is concerned with the evolution of art forms in Herbals. This is as it should be, since Minta Collins is an art historian. On one hand this approach is slightly disappointing for botanists, since the work concentrates on the role of art in herbals and tells us little about the subjects of the illustrations i.e. the plants themselves.

This book is definitely for the specialist but the illustrations which accompany the text (a generous 30 colour plates and 80 black and white ones) require no great depth of knowledge to be appreciated. They show the full gamut of Herbal art, from crude and unidentifiable images to accurate and beautifully depicted specimens which must, surely, have been drawn from life. A number of these were new to me and furnish excellent examples of their kind.

The author rightly points out that at least some of the early herbals were produced as scientific texts. They may have little to do with modern plant systematics in a direct sense but nonetheless form a part of the evolutionary history of the modern discipline and it is both interesting and informative to examine the roots of our subject. Dr Collins' belief that the change in our perceptions of Herbal traditions wrought by recent publications has not yet overtaken the overall view of Herbals is well-founded. However, I found one comment by Dr Collins rather curious - that interest in Herbals has increased in the last twenty years. Perhaps she is speaking relatively, for surely there was great interest in them before 1980!

Bob Press

AN INTRODUCTION TO CLOUD FOREST TREES: MONTEVERDE, COSTA RICA by W. A. HABER, W. ZUCHOWSKI AND E. BELLO.

MOUNTAIN GEM PUBLICATIONS, 2000. 202 pp.

Monteverde is probably the most widely visited cloud forest in the tropics and is a good place to get people interested in plants and botany. This guide is well written and researched and the identification keys are easy to use and sensible i.e. rely on features which you are likely to encounter year round. From the illustrations and descriptions, it is clear that this is the work of experienced field botanists. Particularly good are the 'comments' sections which provide a range of interesting natural history facts plus give an idea as to what local uses exist for the plants. All in all, this is probably the way to get non-botanists to look at the trees and shrubs which surround them in a forest. One small criticism is that this guide appears to exist only in English, which is a shame in a Spanish-speaking country.

Alex Monro

GEORGE CLIFFORD HERBARIUM ON-LINE

George Clifford was an Anglo-Dutch financier with a large mansion and garden, Hartekamp near Haarlem in the Nertherlands. Linnaeus spent some time in the 1730's working in Clifford's garden describing the new plants being cultivated there and compiling his Hortus Cliffortianus (1738). As in other similar works Linnaeus quoted the polynomials of many other authors in synonymy in this work, which he then used extensively when compiling his legendary Species Plantarum (1753). Both the book and the associated specimens thus have an extremely important bearing upon the typification of Linnaean names many of which of course are still in use today, including Triticum aestivum L. (breadwheat), typified by a Clifford specimen.

All of the specimens (nearly 3,500) have now been digitised and a searchable database, including full type informationm, has also been completed. This new addition to the Department's virtual presence, which will be live early 2001, will complement those already on-line (the John Clayton Herbarium, Sir Hans Sloane Jamaican Botanical Collections and The Paul Hermann Herbarium).

http://www.nhm.ac.uk/botany/databases/clifford/index.html

WEB REVIEWS

The Kew Record of Taxonomic Literature is produced by The Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and has been published quarterly by the Stationery Office since 1971. It has long been a valuable source of references for botanists. However, so far there are well over 100 indices to peruse if one wants to find all literature cited for a given taxon. Now, to everyone's great relief, the information has been databased and is available as an online search facility.