Trade Catalogues

The Lindley Library houses the largest collection in the United Kingdom of horticultural trade catalogues, dating primarily from 1860 to the present, but with various 18th- and early 19th-century titles as well. Altogether, some 3,200 firms are represented, the majority British, but a substantial number European and overseas. Current issues of catalogues are on display in the Reading Room at Vincent Square; older catalogues are fetched on request.

In some cases, such as Barr & Sons (later Wallace & Barr), this includes the complete run of a firm’s catalogues; in other cases, a very substantial run; in other cases, only a specimen representation. This collection is regularly consulted by botanists, garden historians, and researchers of the histories of particular plants.

It is not only nurserymen and seedsmen whose firms are represented here. The catalogues of sundriesmen (manufacturers of garden furniture and ornaments, glasshouses, garden chemicals and fertilizers, garden tools) have been more intermittently collected, but the collection is nonetheless the largest and most publicly accessible one in this country, and the late 19th- and early 20th-century glasshouse manufacturers’ catalogues in particular are heavily used by both garden and architectural historians.