The gardens of the 18th and 19th centuries were like zoos, their contents shipped back from the farthest reaches of the globe, their eclectic juxtapositions - phormiums from New Zealand, conifers from North America, rhododendrons from the Himalayas - a reflection of the muddle of motives (scientific, economic, imperialist, commercial) that drove the impulse to find, to name, to possess. And if plants, unlike animals, rarely bite back, wrenching them from the wild nevertheless cost lives.

When David Douglas was sent out to America to collect plants for the recently formed Royal Horticultural Society in 1823, two of his three predecessors had already died on the job: John Potts in India and John Forbes on the Zambezi. Douglas, who was responsible for introducing the Douglas fir and nearly 200 other species into Britain, was himself to all but lose his sight from snow blindness and to die in a cattle trap in Hawaii, gored to death by a maddened bull.

Plant hunters could be beset by pirates and kidnappers and subject to disease, injury, privation, depression and isolation. If they survived, they might be fêted like rock stars. They might make their way to the peak of the Establishment, or end their days in penury.

Flower Hunters is a series of biographical essays on some of the leading players. The book begins with a prologue devoted to John Ray, the 17th-century Cambridge academic and pioneer of plant classification, with chapters on Carl Linnaeus, Joseph Banks, Francis Masson and Carl Peter Thunberg, Douglas, the Lobb brothers, Robert Fortune, Marianne North and Richard Spruce, and ends with Joseph Dalton Hooker, the man who was almost single-handedly responsible for the explosion of rhododendrons in British gardens. They make up what the authors call the First XI of plant hunters.

It is an odd selection: Ray seems out of place here; Linnaeus was a botanist who exaggerated the extent of his travels; North was a painter. Charles Darwin and his voyage on the Beagle have been excluded on the ground of overfamiliarity (although Banks, Hooker and the rest have also been covered at least twice in the past ten years). Ernest Wilson, George Forrest and Frank Kingdon-Ward, who together did much to transform early 20th-century gardens, are also excluded, although all three were born in Victoria's reign. The book ends with Hooker's return from Assam in 1851, William Lobb's last consignment from America in 1858 and Fortune's retirement in 1862.

The effect is curiously muted. John and Mary Gribbin make good use of the plant hunters' own journals and letters but I missed the passion and the pathos. There is also disappointingly little about the plants themselves and a very stingy allowance of plates.

Flower Hunters by Mary and John Gribbin
Oxford University Press, £16.99

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