The Plant Hunters

Karl Linden, a young Bavarian botanist exiled after 1848, goes plant-hunting in the Himalaya with his brother Caspar and the Indian hunter Ossaroo, after the rhododendrons and magnolias the nurserymen of Europe were paying for, and meets tigers, man-eaters and the Himalayan snows on the way. Mayne Reid wrote adventure for boys from a life spent partly in the American west and partly making it up. Forty plates by Edward Lear and Marianne North follow the botanist's trail from Sicilian peaks to Jamaican palms, matching the book's far-flung hunt for rare plants.