PROFILES OF DISCOVERY

Britain is known for its avid gardeners, but what first stimulated this popularity came largely from elsewhere. In The Brother Gardeners (Knopf, $35) Andrea Wulf traces the chain of adventures, discoveries, and friendships that brought about a revolution in botany in the 18th century. When the period began, gardens were formal, geometric constructions enjoyed by the aristocracy and based on French models. By 1760, gardens were everywhere, and even amateurs cultivated their own plots. Wulf focuses on the nearly 40-year trade in plants between the Pennsylvania farmer, John Bartram, and Peter Collinson, the London merchant eager to have specimens of every tree, shrub, flower, and weed he could get from the colonies. Soon English nurseries were supplying European buyers with North American species, while the archetypal English landscaper, Capability Brown, designed gardens full of exotic magnolias and tulip poplars. British gardens continued to reflect the spread of the British Empire, incorporating plants brought back from voyages to Tahiti, the Antipodes, and China. Meanwhile, the introduction of West Indian cotton seeds to Georgia in 1732 set the course for future events. Laurie Greer

An enthralling account of scholarship and adventure, The Sisters Of Sinai (Knopf, $27.95) tells of Agnes and Margaret Smith, wealthy identical Scottish twins. Victorians and devout Calvinists, the pair spent their lives acquiring languages and traveling the Holy Land. With neither husbands nor university degrees, they traveled alone to Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai, where they discovered and translated a Syriac palimpsest that remains one of the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament scriptures. Celebrity preachers and cunning dragomen share the pages of this history, the tone of which mimics the formal novelty of Victorian travel adventures in a tongue-in-cheek manner. British scholar and narrator Janet Soskice uses a bevy of letters, close readings of Agnes Smith’s (mediocre) novels, and an encyclopedic knowledge of Cambridge to contextualize the twins’ discovery (and lives) within the broader climate of Victorian anxiety about Scripture’s authenticity and authority. Lila Stiff