How many kinds of pleasure can the new biography of Joseph Paxton, the genius gardener, bring? Let me count the ways: First, there is the pleasure of history, of seeing how the world has changed, which in this case means how different it can look from one age to another:

[I]n 1500 perhaps two hundred kinds of plants were actively cultivated in England, whereas by 1839 that figure had risen to more than eighteen thousand. Of those plants, evergreens were to transform the English garden and landscape, until now dominated by deciduous native trees.

Imagine what the first evergreen world must have looked like!

It is good to know that the lawn mower was invented in 1830, making lawns feasible for everyone. Constant mowing encourages root growth and the spreading out of grasses. Lawns give the world a new vista. But what do they lead to? To plant beds, Paxton would have told you. Suddenly set against the lawns were carpeted flower beds that, in some cases, imitated the intricate patterns of Oriental rugs. Thus the second virtue of Kate Colquhoun’s “The Busiest Man in England” (Godine, 320 pages, $35) – enhancing the aesthetic – emerges.

Then there is a third enjoyment: situating the biographical subject within his times. Ms. Colquhoun writes,

Like much of England, he [Paxton] had fallen under the spell of the vast yet elusive water lily. It had been discovered in Peru in the early years of the century by Haenke and descriptions of its extraordinary loveliness had caused ripples of excitement throughout the horticultural world.

And embedded in this third delight is a fourth: learning about new realms such as the horticultural world. Even if you are not a gardener, Ms. Colquhoun’s graceful style and her command over sources will entrance you.

This biography is almost beyond compare, one of the most exciting narratives I have ever read – although I must confess that because of a passion for gardening, I am not exactly an im partial critic. But Paxton is such a dynamic, shrewd, and genial figure that it is hard for me to believe that any reader would not be thrilled to learn about him.

Born into the yeoman farmer class at a time when schooling was not mandatory, and, indeed, was resisted by farmers who wanted their children in the fields, Paxton (1803-65) came from nothing much in terms of financial or educational resources. Exactly how he learned to read and write is not ascertainable, but literacy was all he needed to become one of the greatest landscape architects of his day. Employed for more than 25 years by the Duke of Devonshire to make the duke’s home and grounds, Chatsworth, one of the wonders of the world, he also founded important horticultural publications, a radical newspaper (edited for a time by Charles Dickens), and designed the Crystal Palace, one of the high points of Victorian culture and a harbinger of the glass structures of the next century and of innovations such as Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome.

And that’s not the half of it, since Paxton was also a major investor in the first railroads, making a fortune tying the city to the country. He also invented, in effect, the theme park. Dickens called Paxton the busiest man in England (like Dickens himself, Paxton, another exuberant creator, died of sheer exhaustion).

Paxton’s Crystal Palace design for the Exhibition of 1851 made him a national figure. He adapted a greenhouse design employed at Chatsworth into a “fairy palace” of iron and glass, six times the size of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in which more than 6 million visitors strolled through 18 acres of exhibits sponsored by nations from all over the world. Meant as a temporary structure, the Crystal Palace remained intact until a tremendous fire on November 30, 1936, brought it down. In her prologue, Ms. Colquhoun includes a riveting photograph of the building ablaze and provides a stunning account of this glorious edifice’s fall. Its collapse was omen-like, marking the end of the Victorian confidence and optimism that drove Paxton, like so many of his contemporaries, so hard.

As his manifold activities suggest, Paxton did not divorce gardening from the rest of the world. Although his primary employer was a member of the landed gentry, Paxton himself thought of gardening in political terms, as a way of bringing beauty to everyone. He became a liberal member of Parliament for Coventry and spent much of his last decade dealing with sanitation (there were ghastly cholera outbreaks in London). No matter how pressed for time or how complicated his life became, Paxton pursued what he deemed the public good.

This eminent and admirable man would have made a poor subject for Lytton Strachey, who would have been hard put to find lurking in Paxton the dark Freudian unconscious he explored in other Victorian figures such as Dr. Thomas Arnold or Florence Nightingale. One of Paxton’s few failings was not paying enough attention to his wife, who endured her husband’s constant preoccupation and absence while planning many of Britain’s public parks (which, in turn, inspired Frederick Law Olmstead’s plan for Central Park). She was right. He did not have to do quite so much, and she deserved better.

Paxton’s other failure concerned his son, George, who likewise never got enough of Paxton’s attention. It is not fair to blame Paxton for his son’s disreputable life (he became a drunkard and then disappeared), but Paxton certainly did not focus as much on his son’s problems as on his jobs. Sons are not made of glass and iron; perhaps there is an opening there for a Stracheyan after all.

I do not expect to read a better biography this year – or perhaps for a long time to come. Nominated for the Samuel Johnson Prize and short-listed for the Duff Cooper Award, this biography would win any contest I ran.

crollyson@nysun.com