Six-year-old Paxton loves to travel around the world with her mom, dad, brother, and sister. Join them on their latest family adventure in the beautiful city of Paris. There, they will visit the Louvre, Eiffel Tower, Arc De Triomphe, and more! A perfect travel series for kids, Paxton's adventures will ignite your child's curiosity about visiting different countries around the world and the popular sites to see while there.
A brilliantly conceived biography of Joseph Paxton, horticulturist to the Duke & Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth, architect of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and one of the greatest unsung heroes of the Victorian Age In the nineteenth century, which witnessed a revolution in horticulture and urban planning and architecture, Joseph Paxton, a man with no formal education, strode like a colossus. Head gardener at Chatsworth by the age of twenty-three, and encouraged by the sixth Duke of Devonshire whose patronage soon flourished into the defining friendship of his life, Paxton set about transforming this Derbyshire estate into the greatest garden in England. Visitors there were astonished by the enormous glasshouses and ambitious waterworks he built, the collection of orchids, the largest in all England, the dwarf bananas and the gargantuan lily, the trees and plants brought back from all over the world. Queen Victoria came to marvel and, increasingly, with the development of the railway in which Paxton was also involved, daytrippers from all over the country. It was the Crystal Palace, home of the Great Exhibition in 1851, that secured Paxton's fame. His design, initially doodled on a piece of blotting paper, was the architectural triumph of its time. Two thousand men worked for eight months to complete it. It was six times the size of St Paul's Cathedral, enclosed a space of 18 acres, and entertained six million visitors. By the time of his death fourteen years later, 'the busiest man in England' according to Dickens, was friends with Brunel and Stevenson and in constant demand to design public parks and gardens. His last, seemingly most eccentric project was for a Great Boulevard under glass, a crystal arcade that would connect all the main railway termini in London. Drawing on exclusive access to Paxton's personal letters, Kate Colquhouns's remarkable biography is a compelling story of a man who typifies the Victorian ideal of self-improvement and a touching portrait of one of that era's great heroes.
The bestselling author of the true-thriller classics "Air America" and "The Ravens" delivers a compelling portrait of Michel Thomas, a man who fought his way from refugee to resistance leader, from slave laborer to Nazi hunter.
As the British armies march on Charleston, a young girl dreams of love For two years, General Washington and his rebels have outfoxed the British army, humiliating them so soundly that the redcoats have been forced to change strategy. Let Washington have the Northern colonies, they decide—we will attack the South. And the prime target, the jewel of the Southern states, is Charleston. In this cosmopolitan port city where war is about to erupt, Colleen McClagan watches the sea and waits for her lover’s return. It has been four years since Jason Paxton crossed the Atlantic to study music in Europe, and Colleen has counted every day. When he finally returns to the colonies, the two find they are united not only by love, but also by a thirst for liberty. As Colleen writes revolutionary pamphlets, Jason joins the patriots as a secret agent, staking his life on the hope that the land of his birth will one day be free.
Periodical devoted to the illustration in colour of new and uncommon plants grown in British gardens; although primarily horticultural in appeal, it contains the first descriptions of many new species.
In 1837, while charting the Amazonian country of Guiana for Great Britain, German naturalist Robert Schomburgk discovered an astounding "vegetable wonder"--a huge water lily whose leaves were five or six feet across and whose flowers were dazzlingly white. In England, a horticultural nation with a mania for gardens and flowers, news of the discovery sparked a race to bring a live specimen back, and to bring it to bloom. In this extraordinary plant, named Victoria regia for the newly crowned queen, the flower-obsessed British had found their beau ideal. In The Flower of Empire, Tatiana Holway tells the story of this magnificent lily, revealing how it touched nearly every aspect of Victorian life, art, and culture. Holway's colorful narrative captures the sensation stirred by Victoria regia in England, particularly the intense race among prominent Britons to be the first to coax the flower to bloom. We meet the great botanists of the age, from the legendary Sir Joseph Banks, to Sir William Jackson Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to the extravagant flower collector the Duke of Devonshire. Perhaps most important was the Duke's remarkable gardener, Joseph Paxton, who rose from garden boy to knight, and whose design of a series of ever-more astonishing glass-houses--one, the Big Stove, had a footprint the size of Grand Central Station--culminated in his design of the architectural wonder of the age, the Crystal Palace. Fittingly, Paxton based his design on a glass-house he had recently built to house Victoria regia. Indeed, the natural ribbing of the lily's leaf inspired the pattern of girders supporting the massive iron-and-glass building. From alligator-laden jungle ponds to the heights of Victorian society, The Flower of Empire unfolds the marvelous odyssey of this wonder of nature in a revealing work of cultural history.
