Light cover wear. Additional Details ------------------------------ Product description: Longwood Gardens, Inc., 1975. Trade paperback (No ISBN stated) Illustrated by Joan Walter. Very good copy, very good wrappers, back wrapper is a fold-out displaying a map of the location of unusually large tree specimens growing in Peirce's Park. From the "In the year 1800, three men were dreaming about botanic gardens in the vicinity of Chester County, Pennsylvania. One was a well-educated Frenchman, newly arrived to the Philadelphia area and calling himself a botanist, though his fortune would be made in gunpowder mills along the Brandywine River in Delaware. Trained in botany and horticulture at the 'Jardin des Plantes' of Paris , he took an immediate interest in the plants he found growing in the forests and gardens of the Delaware Valley. He never built a botanic garden, but he laid the foundation for what would be one of the world's finest when he bequeathed his love of plants and serious botanical studies to his children and grandchildren. His name was Eleuthere Irenee du Pont de Nemours. The two other men were Quaker farmers, twins named Joshua and Samuel Pierce. Their land lay near the small village of Kennett Square in Chester County, twenty-five miles west of Philadelphia. On it, in 1798, they began an unusual collection of trees and shrubs. Feathery bald cypress from the swamps of Maryland, primitive ginkgoes from the temple gardens of China and a rare yellow cucumber magnolia from Georgia; these and many other species native and foreign to the American woods were assembled in long avenues heading east from the Pierce brothers' farmhouse. Nearby, the men preserved a natural woodlot where tulip trees towered over lesser Chester County yellow-flowered spice bushes, striped jack-in-the-pulpits, waxy mayapples, and fragile little spring beauties... It would be called Longwood Gardens." Nature, history.