David Fairchild - Writings

Writings

Fairchild wrote four books that describe his extensive world travels and his work introducing new plant species to the United States. Beside sharing his legendary tropical botanical expertise, Fairchild provided graphic accounts of native cultures he was able to see before their modernization. He was an accomplished photographer and illustrated these books himself.

• The World Was My Garden: Travels of a Plant Explorer. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1938)
• Garden Islands of the Great East: Collecting Seeds from the Philippines and Netherlands India in the Junk 'Chêng ho. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1943)
• The World Grows Round My Door; The Story of The Kampong, a Home on The Edge of the Tropics. (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1947)
• Exploring for Plants. (New York: Macmillan, 1930).

The World Was My Garden won a National Book Award as the Bookseller Discovery of 1938, voted by members of the American Booksellers Association. The Discovery was "the most deserving book which failed to receive adequate sales and recognition".

In addition Fairchild and his wife Marian wrote an early book on macro photography of insects titled Book of Monsters(Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 1914). Fairchild also wrote numerous monographs about plants, plant exploring, and the transportation and cultivation of new plants in the United States.