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    The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants
    Unavailable
    The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants
    Unavailable
    The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants
    Ebook664 pages12 hours

    The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants

    By Anna Pavord

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    About this ebook

    For centuries, some of the most brilliant minds in Europe searched for the rules of nature's game. In a world full of plagues and poisons, many medicines were made from plant extracts and there was a practical need to differentiate between one plant and another. Alongside this was an overwhelming desire to make sense of the natural world. Scholars, aided by the artists who painted the first pictures of plants, set out looking, writing and classifying, but 2,000 years were to pass before any rules became clear. Anna Pavord takes us on an exhilarating and fascinating journey through botanical history, travelling from Athens in the third century BC, through Constantinople and Venice, Padua and Pisa to the present day.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateDec 15, 2010
    ISBN9781408820766
    Unavailable
    The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants
    Author

    Anna Pavord

    Anna Pavord is the gardening correspondent for THE INDEPENDENT and the author of widely praised gardening books including PLANT PARTNERS and THE BORDER BOOK. She wrote for the OBSERVER for twenty years, has contributed to COUNTRY LIFE, ELLE DECORATION and COUNTRY LIVING, and is an associate editor of GARDENS ILLUSTRATED. For the last thirty years she has lived in Dorset, England where she is currently making a new garden. Constantly experimenting with new combinations of flowers and foliage, she finds it a tremendous source of inspiration.

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    Reviews for The Naming of Names

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      I was expecting a book on the history of taxonomy for plants and what I got was a bunch of brief biographies on mostly medieval, mostly German, herbalists who had printed various volumes listing plants. There is very little in the way of discussion about how the plants are named or organized. It should have been titled A History of Publications About Plants.
    • 5/5
      The extent of my awareness of the naming of plants a few weeks ago was 'Isn't that something to do with Linnaeus?'. Well, this book has put me right in a big way. Linnaeus features only in the epilogue: the main body of the story takes the reader from a Greek, Theophrastus, in the fourth century BC to John Ray, an Englishman of the seventeenth century AD, in the search for the best way to classify plants. It sounds like a dry subject, but the personalities, struggles and inter-relationships of the key players are beautifully portrayed, with room for the personality of the author to permeate the text too. This work is scholarly and accessible and sumptuously illustrated with coloured depictions of plants, maps and portraits. A treasure of a volume.
    • 4/5
      Great book! Amazing illustrations.The author is very good at telling a long history (over 2000 years) on how a standard taxonomy was created for all plants and living things.For some reason Anna Pavord likes to divide all the historical characters in "good guys" and "bad guys". May be it is true, but sometime reading the book I have the impression of watching an Hollywood movie. An as in every respectable film, the good guys at the end prevailed.The battle is not yet over! Take a look at Wikipedia (I'm talking about the English version) and you will see that the scientific notation is not used as a standard way to name plants. For reason I completely ignore Americans still prefer the ambiguous local notation over the scientific one (no surprise, they still discussing about creationism...).