Index of Garden Plants [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONAt first sight, an index to a dictionary may seem superfluous, but the byways of botany are full of free-standing indexes. It is as if, once the Society of Gardeners had published its Catalogas Plantarum in 1730, the list became the plantperson's genre of choice. We have Index Kewensis (all the botanical names for flowering plants). Index Londinensis (illustrations). Index Filicum (ferns), the multi-volume garden nomenclátor Index Hortensis, and a tangled undergrowth of other works to show what is known, grown or sold. Most botanical gardens produce an index viventium - a catalogue of their living rather than their pressed or pickled accessions. Through the combined expertise of hundreds of plant-lovers world-wide, the present volume is an index viventium for the global garden.It has three aims: to list currently accepted botanical names, synonyms and popular names for some 60,000 plants in cultivation; to furnish each plant with a brief description; and to demystify the ways in which such names arise and sometimes change.Gardeners are on intimate terms with a wider range of plants than even some botanists would expect to know. The force of that intimacy gives us in gardens a rich and vital sampling of the world's flora. We are accordingly among the main clients of taxonomy, the science of naming and classifying living things. We need to be able to identify and name with confidence and precision. Botanical understanding not only provides us with a vocabulary for the plants we grow, it may also help us to realize their full horticultural potential. The getting of this understanding is often seen as a process of diffusion from the botanist to the gardener - with unwelcome results: name changes (apparently wilful), the lumping or splitting of seemingly distinct or coherent species, and the pedantic rigmarole of nomenclature. All of which elicits a sigh from the gardener, who might agree with Pope that those responsible ' just like fools, at war about a name/Have full as oft no meaning, or the same'.Resistance to taxonomic change is perfectly natural, unless, of course, we see such change as an index of the very awareness of biodiversity we would all wish to cultivate. Scaiming the tens of thousands of botanical names in this volume, I am aware of a still more basic resistance - to Latin itself- and am reminded of William Gilpin's quip (a hardy perennial since the 1790s) that to treat plants in such a way 'so that nobody but a botanist can find them out, appears something like writing an English grammar in Hebrew. You explain a thing by making it unintelligible.' But plenty of people other than botanists can and do 'find them out', gardeners especially, precisely because the system of botanical nomenclature is intelligent and, with very little effort, intelligible. The altemative is the eclectic roll-call of popular names also to be found in the Index - again, thousands of them, from every conceivable language and culture, no less important than the universal Latin but inevitably less helpful.The arts of the garden and the enquiries of natural philosophy enjoy an ancient alliance. John Parkinson's Paradisi of 1629 catalogues and describes almost a thousand garden plants according to scientific principles and illustrates them in plates whose method would grace any modem monograph. Parkinson the gardener became 'Botanicus Regius Primarius'. The Royal Society's first sponsored publication was John Evelyn's Sylva (1664), an account of his lifelong interest in arboriculture. In the 1768 edition of his Gardener's Dictionary, Philip Miller took the revolutionary step of adopting Linnaeus's system of botanical nomenclature which, in essence, we use to this day. We think of Linnaeus himself, 'the Father of Taxonomy', as patriarch of the purest of sciences, but his own system was inspired in part by the wealth of exotics he encountered as garden superintendent to the Dutch merchant George Clifford. Hortus Cliffortianus (1737) is the log of a Beag/e-like voyage of discovery embarked upon within the confines of a garden.Two centuries later, the American horticulturalist Liberty Hyde Bailey blessed the union of taxonomy and horticulture with the 'Hortorium', a place for the systematic smdy of garden plants. In the British Isles, the botanist's mission remained closely linked to the enrichment of gardens. Alongside Kew and other great clearing houses of our new garden flora, the Royal Horticultural Society strove to propagate and distribute not only the plants themselves but also information about them of the highest quality. This was the spirit in which the society undertook the Dictionary of Gardening, published in 1951. Forty years on, the same spirit informs The New Royal Horticultural Society Dictionary of Gardening. The necessary originality of this work bears witness to rapid progress in horticulture and plant systematics. These two fields, then, come