English Authors on Gardening

On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, with Biographical Notices of Them, 2nd edition, with considerable additions, by Samuel Felton. London: Effingham Wilson and Joseph Onwhyn, 1830.

What an odd book. The title says exactly what it is, but yet it doesn’t. The author 1) makes a list of English authors who have written (or published) books about 2) gardens and gardening (including horticulture) and discusses 3) portraits that have been made of them. These are not “word picture” portraits, but engravings of paintings, etc. that can be found in the various books. Oh, and 4) they were deceased at the time of writing.

The preface starts with

The following pages apply only to those English writers on gardening who
are deceased. That there have been portraits taken of some of those
sixty-nine English writers, whose names first occur in the following
pages, there can be no doubt; and those portraits may yet be with their
surviving relatives or descendants. I am not so presumptuous as to apply
to the following most slight memorials, some of which relate to very
obscure persons, who claimed neither “the boast of heraldry, nor the
pomp of power,” but whose

——useful toil,
Their homely joys and destiny obscure

benefited society by their honest labour;—I am not so vain as to apply
to these, any part of the high testimony which Sir Walter Scott has so
justly paid to the merit of Mr. Lodge’s truly splendid work of the
portraits of celebrated personages of English history. I can only take
leave to disjoint, or to dislocate, or copy, a very few of his words,
and to apply them to the following scanty pages, as it must be
interesting to have exhibited before our eyes our fathers as they
lived, accompanied with such memorials of their lives and characters,
as enable us to compare their persons and countenances with their
sentiments:—portraits shewing us how “our ancestors looked, moved, and
dressed,”—as the pen informs us “how they thought, acted, lived and
died.” One cannot help feeling kindness for the memories of those whose
writings have pleased us.

and continues on for another 35 pages. The book, however, certainly has its charms, and you can imagine some little guy in a tweed coat poring over old books and making careful notes.

DP Project

PG 25773

Thanks to Anonymous for post-processing this project.