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The Flowers of Kew (Magill Book Reviews)

British writer Richard Mabey writes in a formal, passive style that a reader might find dull were it not for the fact that Mabey punctuates his prose with frequent, fascinating anecdotes. For example, he describes how Kew administrators declined Beatrix Potter’s donation to Kew of her fungus paintings; how, in the 1770’s, Kew served as the fashionable place to party on a weekend afternoon; and how the founders of Kew, Frederick, the Prince of Wales and his young German wife, Augusta, “became notorious for conscripting visitors as temporary labourers.”

In addition to sharing such lively stories, Mabey delineates the lives and the distinctive illustrative styles and techniques of the major botanical painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Along the way, he sketches the political and cultural contexts responsible for fostering the Victorian explorers who cultivated exotic plants internationally and whose artistic renderings of those specimens expanded the holdings of Kew’s museum.

THE FLOWERS OF KEW includes nearly two hundred handsome, full-color plates, themselves worth the price of the book; also worthy of note are the inserts that describe the illustration history of particular flora.