The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, The Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created Illustrated Edition, Kindle Edition

A beautiful book, beautifully written - well-researched, illuminating & entertaining, to be kept & treasured among one's favorites - with or without a garden of one's own.

Great read. Interesting history on its discovery and introduction and cultivation.

Reading this causes one [me] to explore more literary and graphic sources. Well researched with author Holway giving treatment to individuals & inhstitutions with contributions made to the discoveries, explorations and cultivation of the giant water lily of British Guiana.

interesting history substantial historic facts presented in an easy to read story

Just when I started to think this book was a little too detailed in coverage of British botanists nearly halfway through, it suddenly became positively fascinating. I do not wish to give to much away, but suffice it to say that the link between an Amazon water lilly and the Crystal Palace exhibition really did exist--mainly through one man--and that this book provides an ultimately highly interesting history of the story of that connection. I did not purchase this book from Amazon but instead happened across it at a nature store, which is why we should all hope that physical retail outlets can continue to compete. I personally know little about botany and gardening, but by the end it was difficult to put this book down. I recommend it highly.

I've just started reading this exciting tale of adventure and the pursuit of a horticultural wonder, told by gifted writer, scholar and Victorian literature expert, Tatiana Holway. Through meticulous research, this book is alive with rich, sumptuous details about a passionate obsession that inspired and left its affect on nearly every aspect of the Victorian life, art and culture.The story revolves around the efforts by an early explorer to map new territory in the Amazon, while simultaneously obtaining plants for private collectors. This led to the surreptitious discovery of a giant water lily, and thanks to well documented diaries and careful research by Holway, this book transports the reader back to an era of exploration and innovation.Wonderful prose, combined with charming old photographs, The Flower of Empire is a fascinating account that will appeal to gardeners and non-gardeners featuring a cast of colorful, historic characters who weave a remarkable story. A royal tribute to the important role that plants have played throughout history.The Flower of Empire: An Amazonian Water Lily, The Quest to Make it Bloom, and the World it Created

It was straight history...No story at all...Really boring.. Our book club suggested it and not one of our avid readers made it past 30

The author has written an engaging history of this water lily and the many people and lives it touched along the way, including the technologies it advanced and events it sparked. Well researched, the narrative provides the reader far more knowledge than could ever be expected from the title or the dustjacket. The writing is clear, concise, and peppered with humor. I thought it would simply be a history of a particular plant, but I was so pleased to get much more than I bargained for. An entertaining read for anyone who is interested in either history or plants. A pure delight for gardeners and historic plant lovers.

Not just the story of the Lily, more the story of Victorian England and its place in the wider world.This is a wonderfully written book, presented more like a novel than a dry history. (Think upmarket version of the raft of The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher style books.) An interest in botany isn't required in order to enjoy this book as a compelling tale of Victorian struggle to achieve the almost impossible. "Just one more chapter" before bed may well see you up to 4AM.The book layout is beautiful, which just adds to its readability. Short chapters with several breaks, gorgeous typography and carefully reproduced drawings and photographs really do make the book engaging on the eye and a treasure in the hand.A fabulous book for anyone with an interest in real life historical trials and tribulations, and the Victorian achievements that drove England forward.

Of course the story of the discovery and cultivation could have been told very quickly. However the detailed information about the people involved in finding and cultivating the plant makes the whole story more interesting. The difficulties in preserving plants on the long sea voyages of the period and in growing them with little or no previous knowledge about their cultivation needs are well covered. In addition you can't help but feel very impressed with the amount of research that must have gone into writing this book.

This is a most unusual book in that it is about acquiring and growing a particular plant that was found in South America and the difficulty in getting it to the UK in a viable state to grow, That is just the start as the conditions here have to just right. you will read about people who are determined in their explorations trying to get plants that nobody has ever seen or heard of before, It was amazing that a huge value and status was put on these plants all these years ago. The explorers were a determined lot and there was a rivalry to get these back home, all this taking place in times where everything took a long time. There are also wealthy patrons and their gardeners who set up hot houses determined to grow these plants and be the first to do so. they threw money at these projects, both in acquiring the plants and trying to grow them. The book is extremely well written, I thought it would be quite dry, but, the author writes in such a way the I never got bored. I knew what the plant looked like when I started the book and this helped. The plant in question is a large floating flowering pond lily.There is a large reference section at the back and I got the feeling thru out the book that the author knew the subject extremely well. There obviously has to be a certain amount of guess work in anything written about events years ago.Very different, Very enjoyable and recommended.

This is a rip-roaring tale of a discovery of a giant water lily which fired the imaganination of Victorian society in Britain. It includes a number of key players and institutions of the time, such as Paxton, Lindley, Kew, the Horticultural Society (yet to obtain its 'Royal' prefix) and the Royal Geographical Society.Little did a German-born explorer working in the toughest conditions in South America know that his discovery would create the sensation it did. What follows is political intrigue at its very best as the task of naming the new plant in honour of the new Queen Victoria without giving offence proves difficult, as well as having to beat off claims from abroad that the discovery isn't new.Then follows the race to get the lily to flower, eventually won by Paxton, a man with humble beginnings, who rose to be one of the most inventive and admired men of the Victorian age. The lily's structure inspired him to design new buildings using glass as a main material in a 'ridge and furrow' design. Not only did this lead to the amazing Crystal Palace which housed the Great Exhibition of 1851, but it also lay one of the main foundation stones (excuse the pun) of modern architecture today.Holway's book is meticulously researched and finely observed. Whilst her style reads a little novelish rather than reference at times, that's not a bad thing. This is no dry historical account and it's good to find an independent American review of an essentially British tale.With London 2012 fresh in our minds, there are many parallels to be drawn between the events of the 19th Century and those leading up to the 20th/21st centuries' Millenium Dome and the Olympics. Viewers of the current BBC4 series 'Unbuilt Britain' (particularly the first episode) will find the detailed background to the inspiration for Paxton's proposed Victorian Way fascinating.

It is the task of the imaginative popular historian to spot chance happenings, apparently trivial in their own right, that become the catalyst setting off chains of consequences that define an era. Such an event was the discovery by a German-born explorer working for the Royal Geographical Society of the world's most remarkable water lily.The Amazon Water Lily is a monster, capable of growing an inch a day, with saucer-shaped leaves that can support a small child and submerged stalks up to twenty feet. Encountered in its natural habitat, it can make upriver travel impossible. Believing (erroneously, as it turned out) that he was the first white man to set eyes on it, Schomburgk sent home a sample in a barrel of brine (it rotted) and painted a detailed picture of his discovery. Then he got on with his job - hustling for funding, tormented by mosquitos and fever, plagued by superstitious natives, unaware that back home his find had created a sensation.It so happened that a young Victoria had recently ascended the throne. It was thought fitting to name the flower after her. This turned out to be a complicated and contentious bussiness, involving considerable sleight-of-hand when certain non-English rotters claimed to have spotted it first. The PR of associating the lily with the Queen was irresistible, but in an age of decorum it sometimes conflicted with scientific common sense. To associate Victoria with mythical forest-dwelling females who eschewed male company in favour of hunting bare-breasted was unthinkable, and indeed the plant did not assume the obvious title of Victoria Amazonica until after her death. Holway's account of all this is absorbing and shows that the concept of "spin" goes back a long way.Having claimed the "vegetable wonder" of the age in the name of the young Queen and the British Empire, the race was on to obtain a specimen, transport it to England and persuade it to bloom, a challenge that took twelve years. For me, this was the heart of the book, and if anyone had told me I would read late into the night, rapidly turning the pages to see the first bud burst before I went to bed, I would have been very surprised. But such is the power of Holway's writing and her ability to create suspense.I won't spoil it for you by saying who won the race, but the contenders (all fascinating in their own right) were Kew Gardens, the immensely rich Duke of Devonshire and his remarkable Head Gardener (who later went on to design the Crystal Palace) and the embryonic Royal Horticultural Society. All three of these august bodies provide rich insight into an age where the British Empire seemed invincible and stretched around the globe. One can't help marvelling at the energy, vision and confidence of these Victorian movers and shakers.Holway convincingly presents us with a line of cause and effect leading from the lily's discovery to the Great Exhibition and beyond. The final chapters risk being somewhat anti-climactic after the excitement of making Victoria Regia bloom in England, but her account of the 1851 Great Exhibition have a remarkably contemporary ring to those of us who remember London 2012. Contemporary accounts of the Exhibition with its stifling heat and indigestible vast array of cultural relics will sound familiar to those of us who were underwhelmed by the contents of the Millennium Dome. Such parallels strengthen case that, unlikely though it may seem, the Amazonian Lily has helped to make our modern world, with its shopping malls and multi-story urban atria, the place it is.Tatiana Holway writes quite beautifully, with an instinctive feel for the rhythms of Victorian prose and a lovely dry humour that skirts the edges of Monty Pythonism at times but never quite tumbles in. If I read a better history book this year, I'll consider myself to be extremely lucky.