Wisley Library

The library at RHS Garden Wisley holds significant collections on practical gardening, garden history and design, and fruit and vegetable gardening.  All garden visitors are welcome and it is particularly relevant to amateur and professional gardeners, and students of garden design or garden history.

The Garden Library collection is open to everyone seven days a week, and lends to RHS members. The lending collection includes most recently published gardening books, RHS publications and a good selection of children’s gardening books.  Visitors are welcome to browse the latest gardening magazines – altogether 90 current titles covering general gardening and garden design, and runs of 19th and 20th century periodicals.

The Science Library, originally set up in 1846 when the RHS acquired its garden at Chiswick, is still the RHS staff and scientific library.  It takes 400 current periodicals and holds a good collection of floras, cultivated plant monographs, and registers and checklists of cultivated plants.  It also has a collection of 14,000 nursery catalogues from c1900 to the present. The Science Library is located in the Laboratory building, and open to the public by appointment.

See also:

Collections

Lending Services

New Additions this month (pdf) (63KB)

Enquiry Services

Library staff offer a specialist enquiry service on garden-related topics, dealing with thousands of enquiries from gardeners, researchers, horticultural students and others, and you don’t need to visit the Library to use the enquiry service.

Contact us by telephone, email, fax or letter.

Wisley Library
RHS Garden Wisley
Woking
Surrey
GU23 6QB

Telephone: 01483 212428
Fax: 01483 479727
Email: library.wisley@rhs.org.uk

Opening hours Garden Library: 11am to 4pm daily including weekends and Bank Holidays. Closes for two weeks in December

Opening hours Science Library: 11am to 4pm Monday to Friday excluding Bank Holidays. Closes for two weeks in December.

Further information about Library Enquiry Services