Raven, Plants and plant lore in ancient Greece.

Condition : very good condition, minor signs of shelf wear.
Illustrations : numerous colour and black and white illustrations in the text.

Did the Greeks classify their plants in the same way as we do? Was a hyacinth in Hyettus the same as a hyacinth in Hull, was a crocus in Cos the same as a crocus in Kew? For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, at the height of classical scholarship, no one cared too much about this. What mattered was that a whole series of plants had been named - an intellectual act that can be attributed to Aristotle's student and slightly older contemporary of Theocritus, Theophrastus. For the Cambridge classicist John Raven, however, the correct identification of ancient names with modern flowers mattered... this quiet gardening scholar cut a furrow of indignant derision in modern definitions of Greek botany. As an observant traveller rather than a library researcher, he showed that many of the flowers listed in Liddell and Scotts' dictionary could not be what the compilers had said they were. No continental mountain was too high, no island meadow too swampy, if he could prove that the main nineteenth-century contributor to the names of Greek flowers, the nepotistically-appointed director of Kew Gardens, Sir William Thiselton-Dyer, was in error.