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The flowering plants in your garden, and their variety of color and form, are the result of hundreds of years of tradition, science, skill and intrepid exploration. They may be native plants carefully selected to provide larger blooms or a greater color range, exotic species with origins in far-distant lands, or cultivars which have been painstakingly bred to conform to an ideal of shape and form. The Gardener's Atlas explores the histories of many of the world's most popular cultivated plants and reveals how and where they grew in the wild. It relates extraordinary and uplifting tales of their discovery in some of the remotest regions on earth -- tales of determination and perseverance, of barter and exchange, and of international friendship struck up between enthusiastic horticulturists from the 1500s onward. There are insights into how plants that are now simply decorative were once used for medicinal or cosmetic purposes, for food or ritual, and into how they earned their common or Latin names. This is a book which cannot fail to enrich your gardening experience.