Thursday 28 August 2014

The Ladies' Flower-Garden


From the collection of Edward Watkin comes this delightfully illustrated gardening manual of 1843, written by Jane Loudon and with exquisite lithographs by Day and Haghe.


Jane C. Loudon (born Jane Webb) was an author of science fiction long before the term was invented, imagining her characters in a futuristic world of trousers for ladies, hair ornaments made of permanent fire, and steam-powered automatons taking the place of surgeons and lawyers. On her marriage to John Loudon, a writer on gardening and agriculture, she became enthused for his subject, and began to write gardening manuals for ladies and those new to the hobby, something nobody had before conceived of.


The Ladies’ Flower-Garden, or Ornamental Perennials, is illustrated with numerous lithographic plates by William Day and Louis Haghe, ‘Lithographers to the Queen’, who produced a large quantity of technically brilliant lithographic work in the early Victorian period.