Ursula Buchan

Blooming marvellous: the year’s best gardening books

Subjects include Catesby’s Natural History, London’s lost green spaces, planting for colour in borders and the complexity of a garden’s ecology

Magnolia grandiflora (the Laurel Tree of Carolina), by Mark Catesby. [Alamy] 
issue 16 November 2024

I am an absolute sucker for a handsome reproduction of a rare and highly illustrated natural history, preferably more than two centuries old. This may possibly be a niche interest, but Catesby’s Natural History was pronounced a wonder when it was first published and is a wonder still.

Mark Catesby was ‘a procurer of plants’, sponsored by a group of rich, curious patrons, including William Sherard and Sir Hans Sloane, to explore and record the flora and fauna of the most southern of the Thirteen Colonies – the Carolinas and Florida, as well as the Bahamas Islands.

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