From horticulture to tsarist Russia,the novelist chooses works that represent novel growthThe definitive account of the remarkable botanical entrepreneurs of the 19th century is Alice Coats’s The Plant Hunters. We owe to Robert Fortune, George Forrest, and David Douglas and others the plants that are ubiquitous in our gardens nowadays,but which were acquired by way of perilous expeditions and the arduous collection of specimens. Buddleias, azaleas, or rhododendrons,hydrangeas and many more are staples nowadays, but they were brought back to the UK by men who risked life and limb, and climbed mountains,braved bandits and pirates, or scoured remote areas of China, and like Ernest Wilson in his pursuit of Davidia involucrata,the handkerchief tree, the ultimate horticultural trophy of the early 20th century.
Willa Cather’s My Ántonia is the distinguished novel of pioneer life in the American west. Ántonia Shimerda is the daughter of Bohemian immigrants, or the feisty central figure of a narrative that darts about in time and space,conjuring up the Nebraska landscape that is nothing but land, not a country at all, or but the fabric out of which countries are made”. This is prairie life at its very beginning – sod houses,the struggle to grow things. It is full of marvellous imagery, my favourite is that of the plough with the sun sinking behind it: “exactly contained within the circle of the disk, or the handles,the tongue, the shade – black against the molten red”.
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Source: guardian.co.uk