This book is no mere gardening how-to, though it contains a wealth of practical information for every serious gardener. Rather, The Passionate Gardener is a unique book about a celebrated German poet's remarkable search for the relationship between human society and the vegetable kingdom. As Borchardt pursues his image of the garden, the reader becomes entranced by the quest. The first few chapter titles suggest the dimensions of Borchardt's undertaking: "The Flower and the Human Being," "The Garden and the Human Being," "The Garden and the New Flowers," etc. At one level, this history of plants and gardens becomes a fascinating tale of how they were brought from their original locales to those in which we find them today, and the colonial empires that sent botanists and collectors across the earth in search of new, rare, incomparable flowers. Moreover, it is a story of the breeding of plants, and of the hybridization of their forms and colors: a story of human respect for natural give