Re: Christmas Gift Ideas and New Books Coming out

**d*@aol.com**

 Hi, Donna... 

I'd like to nominate a gadget that I saw at the GWA Symposium in Raleigh -- PlantCam, which enables you to create a time-lapse "movie" of your plants growing....or anything else you'd like to point it at. I've already requested one from my family for Christmas. It's new, so I may not be able to actually get one by Christmas (I told the family I'd take an IOU for spring), and it is made by Wingscapes (www.wingscapes.com), the same people who make the motion-activated Audubon BirdCams. But where those products cost $159 and up, the PlantCam has a recommended retail price of $79 -- so I figure it wouldn't break the bank for my relatives. (I haven't used it myself, but I loved the video they showed at the symposium of how it works.)

As for books, can we recommend other people's books? I really like two books that came out earlier this year, both about (at least in  part) colonial botanist John Bartram and Bartram's Garden in Philadelphia, and the role Bartram and other plant collectors played in sending American plants to Europe. One is "Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire, and the Birth of an Obsession" by Andrea Wulf, published by Knopf ($35, but $23.10 on Amazon); the other is "Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-Century Natural History Exchange" by Jean O'Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean, published by the American Philosophical Society ($75 from the society, www.amphilsoc.org, or Amazon). Fascinating reading if you are interested in plants and history, because the authors delve into personalities as well as history, and have some wonderful illustrations.

Denise, in Philadelphia 

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