hand-coloured plates

Second edition, beautifully illustrated with 42 hand-coloured botanical plates.

Jane Loudon (1807-1858) began writing to support her family after her father's death, publishing books such as the pioneering science fiction novel The Mummy! She met her husband, landscape designer John Claudius Loudon, in 1830 after he reviewed the book favourably and sought the author's acquaintance. Loudon worked closely with her husband on his Gardener's Magazine and accompanied him on tours through England and Scotland, recording his observations of the gardens they visited. To improve her knowledge of plants she also attended lectures by the botanist John Lindley. When the couple's publishing business went into debt, Loudon 'turned again to authorship, and tapped the ready Victorian market for books popularising horticulture, botany, and natural history. Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1840) was hugely successful; 1,350 copies were sold on the day of publication alone. The Ladies' Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals, the first in a much-reprinted series of informative illustrated books, was followed by others about bulbs, greenhouse plants, and perennials' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

Second edition; 4to; 42 hand-coloured lithographs, contemporary gift inscription to the title, contents faintly toned with occasional small spots, splits and abrasions repaired on the edge of plate 93 and the following leaf of text; original green cloth blocked in gilt and blind, original yellow coated endpapers, recased and rebacked with the original spine laid down, some loss of the cloth at the spine ends, spine rolled, cloth browned and a little marked, hinges repaired, a very good copy; 215pp.