Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

The drawings of the plants show no artistic improvement over Parkinson's, but are much in the same style. 1739. ' New Improvements of Planting and Gardening, both Phylosophical and Practical, by Eichard Bradley.' This is a small book with rather good copper-plates, and interesting as showing the researches and ideas of an 60 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN intelligent man just previous to the illuminating of botany through the works of Linnaeus, who in 1739 was only thirty-two. He knew that earthworms were hermaphro- dites, but from a text of Scripture he was convinced that plants have their seeds in themselves, and that every plant contained in itself male and female powers. The common Aucuba, so long a puzzle to botanists, only received its green-leaved pollen-bearing mate from Japan towards the middle of this century. Before that it was only propagated by cuttings, and never bore any red berries. The gardening books of the last century are full of useful hints, as gardening was then practised and written about by men of the highest education ; and very often this was done solely for botanical and what they called ' philosophical ' reasons. Sometimes the childish earnestness of their ignorance concerning facts now known to every schoolchild accentuates the extraordinary advance and increased popularising of knowledge since that day. 1732. ' Hortus Elthamensis, a Johanne Jacobo Dil- lenio, M.D.' Two folio volumes published in London, and interesting as showing the general development of the improved power of illustrating. The plates are coloured by hand, and contain many figures of Cape Aloes, Gera- niums, and other African plants, either depicted with their roots or as growing out of the ground. The text is in Latin. 1771. ' Uitgezochte Planten, by Christ. Jacob Trew, Georgius Dionysius Ehret, Joh. Jacob Haid.' The characteristic of this large folio is that it begins with very fine separate portraits of the three authors. One seems to have been the botanist, one the artist, and one the engraver. It was brought out at Amsterdam by sub- scription, as was so common with handsome books in those days. The book begins with a long list of sub- MARCH 6 1 scribers. The flower-plates are extremely fine, very strongly coloured, and as fresh and bright as the day they were painted, each page being covered with a sheet of dark-grey thick hand-made paper, such as Turner loved to sketch upon. One of the things figured is the Japanese plant, Bocconia cor data (' Plumed Poppy,' Eobinson calls it), which we have been in the habit of thinking a new plant in our gardens. Many of the plates are inter- esting and a few remarkable, and the botanical details of the flowers beautifully drawn, some natural size and some magnified. 1771. 'The Flora Londinensis, by William Curtis.' The first number was brought out by subscription on the above date. I have the two volumes of the first edition. It is the handsomes the most artistic, and the best drawn of any English illustrated botanical books I have seen. I do not know who was the artist, but I imagine not Curtis himself. These plates have some of the qualities of Jacquin's drawings, of which more hereafter. How much they were in communication, a not uncommon custom of the time, I do not know. Curtis's first book was a translation of Linnaeus's, with the title of ' An Introduction to the Knowledge of Insects.'