George Don the Forfar Botanist, and David Booth the Newburgh Brewer and Author, were the closest of friends. Their lives were intertwined with the lives of Robert Brown, William Thomas Baxter, William Godwin, Dr Patrick Neill, and Archibald Constable, and many other notable contemporaries. The lives of their children, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, David Don, George Don junior, Isabella Baxter, and Robert Baxter, were also intertwined. This biographical account of the life of the Scottish Botanist George Don (1764-1814) tells the story of the life and times of these, his friends and his contemporaries, their extraordinary successes during a time of enlightenment and their struggles through the economic years after European wars.