The Ensonglopedia of Plants: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The Ensonglopedia of Plants was commissioned from composer, performer and science communicator, John Hinton, to celebrate the completion of the Rising Path project at the Botanic Garden. The Rising Path is an exciting new venture which offers a new perspective on the Garden's historic Systematic Beds. John has woven together science, history, fable and folklore to give his unique iand highly entertaining take on ten key plant families grown on the Systematic Beds: the buttercups, the mustards, the roses, the peas, the carrots, the daisies, the irises, the grasses, the nightshades and the mints. The ten songs, which range in style from traditional to trance are introduced by Theme for a Systematic Garden which brilliantly summarises and sometimes satirises how plant taxonomy, the science of classifying plants, has changed since the Systematic Beds were laid out in 1846. Download the Ensonglopedia of Plants and enjoy a unique musical journey through the Garden's Systematic Beds.
We meet Mr Carrot and his vast family of herbal helpers including Dr Dill and Nurse Caraway.....
Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? We never get close enough to find out - they're just thorny, thorny, thorny....
In this song about the mustard family set in a take-away, we discover why so many are so darn hot!
Page one of de Candolle's 1813 textbook concerned the buttercup, which is why we all learnt the buttercup in biology at school, even though there is nothing standard about a buttercup. John Hinton runs through the key features of the flower.
The introductory song to The Ensonglopedia of Plants in which the challenges of sorting plants in a post-DNA world are discussed. We meet Andrew Murray, the Garden's first Curator, and Augustin de Candolle, whose 1813 text book is the intellectual underpinning of the Garden's historic Systematic Beds.