Weekly Book Special: Forget not Mee and My Garden . . . : Selected Letters, 1725-1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S. (American Philosophical Society)

March 15th-21st Weekly Half-Price Book Special

Warm weather and buds on the trees means only one thing: spring is right around the corner! Coinciding with the season, this week’s special is:

Forget Not Mee and My Garden:
Selected Letters, 1725-1768, of Peter Collinson, F.R.S.
by Alan W. Armstrong (Hardcover, 300 pages, 2002, $60.00)

English-style gardens around the world, from suburban yards to large parks, owe their foundations to businessman Peter Collinson.

Flowers and plants in these gardens are descended from the hundreds of seeds that Collinson imported from celebrated American botanist John Bartram in the 1700s.

This limited-edition book published by the American Philosophical Society, in shrinkwrap, features Collinson’s nearly 200 letters to the colonial world’s top scientists, including Batram, Carl Linnaeus and Benjamin Franklin, and features more than 100 full-color illustrations.

My favorite spread is of the Chestnut, Dogwood and Fringe Trees (click to enlarge):

“All letters in this volume are Collinson’s; they’re fully footnoted, and all correspondents are well-introduced,” writes Book News. “The color plates of correspondents, flora, and fauna make this a beautiful, as well as informative, read.”

“[The] deft match of text and image and [the] superb but unobtrusive editing,” writes historian Eugenia Herbert, “leave no doubt the Quaker merchant’s seminal role in the grand Enlightenment project of mapping the natural world.”

Purchase this book for $60: