Britton's Botanical Empire: The New York Botanical Garden and American Botany, 1888-1929. By Peter Mickulas. (Bronx: New York Botanical Garden Press, 2007. 317 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-89327-479-5.)

Abstract

Peter Mickulas has provided a nicely researched, well-written work that is not a comprehensive study of the New York Botanical Garden's first three decades or a biography of Nathaniel Lord Britton. However, Britton was the primary motivator for the founding of the garden and its first director, and did little during the period covered by this study that was not associated with the garden. It was certainly a symbiotic relationship. Mickulas first lays out a background story of botany and horticulture in nineteenth-century New York. Britton built on that foundation, and, with his wife, Elizabeth—also a leading American botanist—and others, used the Kew Gardens in Great Britain as a model to create a garden for America's metropolis. In examining the creation and operations of the garden, Mickulas takes the reader through disputes during the 1890s and again in the 1920s over details regarding the buildings and physical layout of the grounds as well as the role of the garden in New York's cultural development. Mickulas discusses the garden in terms of philanthropy, the development of parks and gardens, public education, museum design, and urban landscaping. The garden side of the study is woven into the larger story of Britton and his botany.