The King's Garden

the long version

This translation of Marguerite Duval's La Planete des Fleurs, first published in Paris in 1977, is an important contribution to a sadly neglected faced of history - that of botanical exploration and discovery. During a quarter millennium of the age of discovery, a stream of daring and dedicated men searched the entire world from the Arctic Circles to the Antipodes to discover and bring back to Europe exotic and other useful productions of nature from every green corner of the world. No important aspect of history has been more unjustifiably neglected than the heroic, sociologically highly significant, often dramatic, often tragic, voyages of discovery of the plant hunters. Many of the treasures that were the fruit of their expeditions into the far-flung, newly discovered reaches of the world wrought immensely important changes and developments in the burgeoning Western civilization.