The Book of Palms

After an epic Amazonian journey through Brazil and Peru from 1817 to 1820, German botanist Carl von Martius compiled a catalogue of all known genera of palm trees. This encyclopedic work, reproduced in our volume, is a jewel of 19th-century botany and is celebrated for its detailed classifications, maps, color landscapes and diagrams.

The author

H. Walter Lack  is a professor at the Free University of Berlin and former director of the Botanical Gardens and Botanical Museum in Berlin-Dahlem. A leading expert in the history of botany, his research focuses on the global transfer of useful and ornamental plants from a cultural historical perspective. He is the author of TASCHEN’s Garden of Eden, The Book of Palms and Redouté. The Book of Flowers.