By the early eighteenth century, botanists were inching towards the shocking truth that plants had male and female organs and reproduced sexually.The first person to realize the practical implications of this was Thomas Fairchild, a London nurseryman, and celebrated author of The City Gardener.By transferring the pollen of a sweet william into the pistil of a carnation, he created a new plant that became known as Fairchild's mule.The first man-made hybrid in Europe, it heralded the thousands of new varieties available to gardeners today.This primitive form of genetic engineering aroused as much of a storm as genetically modified plants provoke today.As the scientific and religious debate raged, satirists wrote lewd verses about sex in the flowerbeds and railed against meddling with God's design. Michael Leapman, a brilliant horticultural writer, has unearthed fascinating and colorful detail about the life and times of Thomas Fairchild, a troubled, gentle soul whose pioneering work changed the course of horticulture and paved the way for the growth of gardening as a cultural obsession. AUTHORBIO: Michael Leapman is an award-winning journalist who writes on gardening and other topics for several newspapers and magazines, including The Economist, The Garden, and Gardens Illustrated.He is a former editor of The Times Diary and was also the paper's New York correspondent.An authority on London, he has written and edited a number of books about the city including London's River and Eyewitness Guide to London.His first book, One Man and His Plot, was about the allotment in Brixton, South London, which he and his wife Olga still cultivate.