London Printed Book Collections

The country's, and probably the world's, most comprehensive collection of horticultural literature from the 16th century to the present day. The collection includes over 50,000 books, ranging from a 1514 edition of Pliny to the latest publications on garden plants. Some 650 books are pre-Linnaean, that is, published before 1753, the date of Linnaeus' Species plantarum and the beginning of modern botanical nomenclature. Among these is a good collection of 16th- and 17th-century herbals, with most of the important titles represented, some in coloured copies.

While the bulk of the collection is in English, it is international in scope and includes works written in more than twenty languages. Particularly noteworthy is an excellent collection of Japanese horticultural works, including Akizato's Miyako-rinsen-meisho-zue (Famous gardens in the capital, 1799), recording the gardens of Kyoto in the late 18th century.

The subject matter is primarily horticultural and botanical: floras of different parts of the world, works on the taxonomy and nomenclature of plants, encyclopaedias and dictionaries of gardening, works on gardening under different environmental conditions and on different soils, pruning, propagation, pests and diseases, fruit and vegetables, herb gardening, mushroom growing, trees and shrubs, house plants, greenhouse gardening and garden history. There is an extensive section on garden design and construction, and sections on botanical illustration and flower arrangement, as well as smaller groups of books on subjects as diverse as weather, forestry, agriculture, and cookery. There is, of course, a complete set of the works of John Lindley (1799-1865), whose library formed the basis of the collection.

Among the more important items to be found in this library are: the account book of Capability Brown (on permanent loan); one of Humphry Repton's Red Books (for Waresley Park, Huntingdonshire); one of two copies of Turpin and Poiret's Leçons de flore (1820) printed on vellum and coloured by the artist, made for European monarchs (our copy is the one made for Louis XVIII); both editions of John Sibthorp's Flora Graeca (1806-40), one of the most important floras ever published, making this library probably the only publicly accessible institution where both editions can be compared; and a large number of guidebooks and larger publications on various individual gardens, including the manuscript record books for Gravetye Manor, on which William Robinson based his published account of his garden.

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