One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds...

Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestsellingGardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook'sEndeavour.

This is the story of these men - friends, rivals, enemies, united by a passion for plants. Set against the backdrop of the emerging empire and the uncharted world beyond,The Brother Gardenerstells the story how Britain became a nation of gardeners.

Andrea Wulf was born India and moved to Germany as a child. She trained as a design historian at the Royal College of Art and is the co-author (with Emma Gieben-Gamal) ofThis Other Eden: Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History. She has written for theSunday Times, theFinancial Times,Mail on Sunday,The Garden, theArchitects' Journal, and regularly reviews for several newspapers, including theGuardianand theTimes Literary Supplement. She is a regular contributor to BBC radio and television.