Botanical Revelation: European encounters with Australian plants before Darwin

Acclaimed author David Mabberley provides a ground-breaking analysis of early European understanding of Australia’s flora.

Combining science, horticulture, art and economics, this lavishly illustrated book – with many never before-published images – reveals the motives and complex networks that led to the international spread of knowledge and cultivation of hundreds of Australian plants in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Based on the superb Peter Crossing Collection, Botanical Revelation documents a revolutionary phase in the understanding of Australia’s flora and science more generally.