1     Horace Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening [1780] (New York: Ursus Press, 1995, based on 1782 edition), 43. »

2     John Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum; or, The Royal Gardens in Three Books’, British Library, Add. MS 78342, fols 37, 86v, 172v and 231v; see John Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum; or The Royal Gardens, ed. John E. Ingram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 64, 129, 225 and 301. See Mark Laird, ‘Lilac and Nightingale: A Heritage of Scent and Sound at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill’, in Sound and Scent in the Garden, ed. Dede Fairchild Ruggles (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections) [forthcoming]. »

3     Ingram, ed., Elysium Britannicum; quoted by Frances Harris in ‘The Manuscripts of the “Elysium Britannicum” ’, ibid., 15. »

4     Walpole, The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening, John Dixon Hunt’s introduction, 14. »

5     Ingram, ed., Elysium Britannicum, quoted in Harris, ‘The Manuscripts of the “Elysium Britannicum” ’, 14. »

6     Douglas Chambers, ‘ “Excuse these Impertinences”: Evelyn in his Letterbooks’, in John Evelyn and his Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunter (London: The British Library, 2003), 21–36 and especially 33. Chambers calls the writings in progress ‘dialectic’ responses to other ‘hypertexts’. »

7     Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 8v; see Ingram, ed., Elysium Britannicum, 31. »

8     For an index to the plants illustrated in Flora Londinensis, see Allan Stevenson’s compilation, Catalogue of Botanical Books in the Collection of Rachel McMasters Miller Hunt, vol. II, part 2: Printed Books, 1701–1800 (Pittsburgh, PA: Hunt Botanical Library, 1961), 389–412. The title of the work is Flora Londinensis; or, Plates and Descriptions of such Plants as Grow Wild in the Environs of London, etc. Although the date of publication of the first volume is 1777, Curtis began work on it in 1775. The second volume is dated 1798. As Stevenson explains: ‘The work was published in six fascicles to be found in two volumes, and each fascicle was issued in twelve “Nos.”, six plates at a time with accompanying text. The plates themselves were numbered in three different ways, as indicated in the list below: a) the numbers assigned to them in each fascicle index, showing relative positions according to the Linnaean system; b) the numbers assigned in each volume index, these also being according to the Linnaean system; and c) the numbers engraved on some of them, which correspond to no others.’ This sequence of three (or sometimes only two) numbers is given with the fascicle number and the ‘Nos.’ numbers. For example, the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea) is in fascicle 1, no. 11, and a) is 48 while b) is 132 and c) is missing (see pl. 299). »

9     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Menyanthes trifoliata, fascicle 4, no. 40, a) 17, b) 50, c) 240. Much of the discussion involves bringing ‘neglected British Plants’ into cultivation. »

10     The celebration of the ‘weed’ grows out of eighteenth-century sensibilities. For example, see Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (London: Allen Lane, 1983), 272–3. Curtis gave a good definition of the weed under Bistort (Polygonum bistorta), fascicle 1, no. 2, 22, 71: ‘WHEN a Plant not intended to be cultivated, in any respect prevents the growth of one which is the object of Cultivation, such a plant, however beautiful, may with propriety be called a Weed.’ But an ideological cult of the ‘native’ (including some plants previously thought of only as ‘weeds’) came much later, as is discussed in Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, Nature and Ideology: Natural Garden Design in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1997). »

11     Curtis included plants such as Datura stramonium (fascicle 6, no. 61, 17, 55) that had become naturalized, admitting them as ‘doubtful natives’. »

12     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Butomus umbellatus, fascicle 1, no. 1, 29, 79; Oxalis acetosella, fascicle 2, no. 19, 31, 89, 111; Adonis annua, fascicle 2, no. 23, 37, 106, 135; dandelion (Taraxacum officinale), fascicle 1, no. 3, 58, 165. »

13     Ibid., Anagallis arvensis, fascicle 1, no. 1, 12, 36. »

14     See David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History [1976], 2nd edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 25. »

15     Ibid., 40. »

16     Ibid. »

17     The most recent and comprehensive account of the cabinet of curiosities is Arthur MacGregor’s Curiosity and Enlightenment: Collectors and Collections from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007). See also Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinets of Curiosities in 16th-and 17th-century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985). See also Erik de Jong, Nature and Art: Dutch Garden and Landscape Architecture, 1650–1740 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 135–8, for a good discussion of the early botanic garden as ‘museum’. »

18     See, for example, an extensive literature extending from Gustave Loisel, Histoire des ménageries de l’antiquité à nos jours (Paris, 1912), to Wilfrid Blunt, The Ark in the Park: The Zoo in the Nineteenth Century (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976), to R. J. Hoage and William A. Deiss, eds, New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), and Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion, 2002). There is a good discussion of ‘exotic captives’ in the age of empire in chapter 5 of Harriet Ritvo’s The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 205–42. »

19     The Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Art Reference Library, New York, established in 2007, represents the increasing interest in the field of collecting history. The Journal of the History of Collections, currently under the editorship of Arthur MacGregor and Kate Heard, was established as an Oxford University Press publication in 1989. For recent scholarship, see again MacGregor, Curiosity and Enlightenment. »

20     Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Mark Laird and Alicia Weisberg-Roberts, eds, Mrs Delany and her Circle (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). »

21     Beth Fowkes Tobin, ‘The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting, Gender and Scientific Practice’, in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 244–63. See also Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2014), 249 and chapter 7 in general. »

22     Keith Thomas, The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 21, and more generally 20–24 and 104–7. »

23     In The Ends of Life, 225, Keith Thomas writes, for example, in reference to private lives and a growing concern with self-expression among roads to human fulfilment: ‘It is only recently that historians have emancipated themselves from the classical preoccupation with public affairs and begun to take these human concerns into account.’ »

24     For a short account of ‘Cabinets of Curiosity’, see Robert Huxley, ‘Natural History Collectors and their Collections: “Simpling Marcaronis” and Instruments of Empire’, in Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Press, 2003), 80–82. »

25     See Jane Wildgoose, Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship and the Order of Things (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2009). See the preface to the Catalogue of the Portland Museum of 1786. Beth Tobin provides background on the authorship of the catalogue and many new insights on how it relates to the collections before the auction. See Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 209–13 and 217–29. »

26     Huxley, ‘Natural History Collectors and their Collections’, 84. »

27     Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 112–13. All subsequent quotes in this paragraph are from these pages of Allen’s study. For conchology before the duchess of Portland and the Linnaean era, see S. Peter Dance, A History of Shell Collecting (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), chapter 3; George Montagu is mentioned in chapter 6, 110–11. For a complex analysis of the subtle distinctions between scientific collections and connoisseurial collecting that were eclipsed in the nineteenth century, see Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, chapter 1. »

28     Ibid., 256–60. »

29     Specialization in the garden is discussed in Mark Laird, ‘Plantings’, in A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire, 1800–1900, ed. Sonja Dümpelmann (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), vol. V in the series A Cultural History of Gardens, ed. John Dixon Hunt and Michael Leslie, 69–89. »

30     Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 241 with illustrations from Donovan throughout the book, notably plate 10. »

31     For Adrian Hardy Haworth (1767–1833) and his Lepidoptera Britannica, see Michael A. Salmon, The Aurelian Legacy: British Butterflies and their Collectors (Colchester: Harley, 2000), 127–8. For William Lewin’s Papilios of Great Britain (1795), which, though incomplete, marked one significant advance before 1800, see also ibid., 122–3. »

32     Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 112–13. For a correction to the often-repeated assertion about Miss Hutchins, see M. E. Mitchell, ed., ‘Early Observations on the Flora of Southwest Ireland: Selected Letters of Ellen Hutchins and Dawson Turner, 1807–1814’, in National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin, Occasional Papers, XII (Dublin, 1999), n. 96. »

33     Ada K. Longfield, ‘William Kilburn (1745–1818) and his Book of Designs’, Irish Georgian Society Bulletin, XXIV/1–2 (January–June 1981); E. Charles Nelson, ‘William Kilburn’s Calico Patterns, Copyright and Curtis’s Botanical Magazine’, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, XXV/4 (November 2008), 361–73. »

34     Quoted in Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 113. Peter Collinson, in writing to Christoph Jakob Trew about George Knorr’s aquatints, made the distinction between scientific illustration of a single shell and shells and fossils arranged together ‘as if intended for Pictures for Ornament for Ladies Closetts’. See Jean O’Neill and Elizabeth P. McLean, Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-century Natural History Exchange (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008), 127. »

35     Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 88. »

36     Dance, A History of Shell Collecting, 73. »

37     Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 62–4. »

38     Thomas Martyn, The Universal Conchologist. Exhibiting The Figure of every known Shell accurately drawn and painted after Nature With A New Systematic Arrangement by the Author (London, 1784–7; second issue 1789), 11–12. »

39     Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 24. »

40     John Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature: The Botanical Horizons of Mary Delany’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 195. »

41     See Wilfrid Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration [1950], ed. William T. Stearn (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1994), chapter 14; see also James H. Green, ‘Hand-Coloring Versus Color Printing: Early-Nineteenth-Century Natural History Color-Plate Books’ in Knowing Nature: Art and Science in Philadelphia, 1740–1840, ed. Amy R. W. Meyers (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 261–2. »

42     Blunt, The Art of Botanical Illustration, ed. Stearn, 244. See also R. J. Cleerly, ‘Some Notes and Comments on the Illustrations of Henry Charles Andrews (fl. 1790s–1830s)’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI/1 (April 2009), 165–7, and E. Charles Nelson, ‘Henry Andrews’s Dahliae mythologicae’, Newsletter of the Society of Natural History, XCIX (October 2010), 8–9, for the use of ‘Charles’ as Henry Andrews’s middle name. »

43     Ray Desmond, The History of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (London: Harvill Press/The Royal Botanic Gardens, 1995), 107. »

44     See again Laird, ‘Plantings’. »

45     Marcus B. Simpson, Jr, Stephen Moran and Sallie W. Simpson, ‘Biographical Notes on John Fraser (1750–1811): Plant Nurseryman, Explorer and Royal Botanical Collector to the Czar of Russia’, Archives of Natural History, XXIV/1 (February 1997), 1–18. »

46     Edgar T. Wherry, The Genus Phlox (Philadelphia: [Associates of the Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania], 1955), 120. »

47     Ibid., 113. »

48     Mark Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden: English Pleasure Grounds, 1720–1800 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 221. »

49     Mary Delany to Mary Port, 9 June 1776, in The Autobiography and Correspondence of Mary Granville, Mrs Delany, ed. Lady Llanover, 6 vols (London: Bentley, 1861–2), V, 223. »

50     See Kim Sloan, ‘A Noble Art’: Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters, c. 1600–1800 (London: British Museum, 2000), 148–9, 157. »

51     Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, chapter 10. »

52     For background in the history of natural history, see Tim Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds: An Illustrated History of Ornithology (London: Bloomsbury, 2008); for the later history of the discipline and the German influence, see J. Haffer, ‘The Origin of Modern Ornithology in Europe’, Archives of Natural History, XXXV/1 (April 2008), 76–87. »

53     See T. R. Birkhead and S. van Balen, ‘Bird-keeping and the Development of Ornithological Science’, Archives of Natural History, XXXV/2 (October 2008), 281–305. The authors argue in the synopsis: ‘By ignoring the early bird-keeping literature, historians of ornithology have overlooked many significant observations’, which include those on song acquisition, territory, migration, and instinct and learning. »

54     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Ligustrum vulgare, fascicle 5, no. 51, 1, 3, 300. »

55     Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 25. Further work is required to interpret the relatively sparse entries on birds, and their nests and eggs, in the Catalogue of the Portland Museum (1786): see, for example, ‘Birds Eggs’ (38), ‘British Birds Nests, with their Eggs’ (63), lot 1443: ‘A very fine and complete collections of near two hundred species of British Birds eggs, all arranged and named according to the Linnaean system’ (64), and lot 2809: ‘The original drawings of Birds, by Albin, most beautifully coloured after nature, 202 in number, on vellum, 2 vols’. See lot 1429 regarding the ‘Sedge-bird, Motacilla arundinacea’ (Tab. 1), which is the basis for Acrocephalus arundinaceus the great reed warbler (John Lightfoot in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, LXXV/1, 1785, 8–15, Tab. 1; and see also lot 1662, which refers to ‘Motacilla Hirundinaceae’. »

56     George Edwards’s original subscribers of 1743 included only a handful of women: the countess of Hertford, Lady Heathcote, wife of Sir John Heathcote, the Hon. Lady Wager, etc. By 1751 a slightly larger group of women of middling rank had been added, along with the countess of Albemarle. »

57     See Mark Laird, ‘The Culture of Horticulture: Class, Consumption, and Gender in the English Landscape Garden’, in Bourgeois and Aristocratic Cultural Encounters in Garden Art, 1550–1850, ed. Michel Conan (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection), 247–8. »

58     See, for example, Michael Walters, A Concise History of Ornithology: The Lives and Works of its Founding Figures (London: Christopher Helm, 2003). He documents no active involvement of women in the early modern period, and this is also apparent in Peter Bircham, History of Ornithology (London: Collins, 2007). Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 207–8, provides a good account of the shift in ornithology in the early twentieth century: ‘Feminine Emancipation brought women into the field by the thousand — and most of them had little liking for weaponry.’ »

59     Thomas, The Ends of Life, 53. »

60     Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 84. »

61     Ibid., 83. »

62     Ibid., 88. »

63     Ibid., 209. »

64     Ibid. It was John Freeman Milward Dovaston who popularized his ingenious gadget for feeding birds. »

65     Ralph Beilby, History of British Birds the Figures Engraved on Wood by T. Bewick (Newcastle, 1797), 248. For a discussion of Bewick, and the success of his A General History of Quadrupeds (1790) in relationship to Gilbert White’s The Natural History of Selborne, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: HarperCollins, 1997), chapter 13, and especially 516. »

66     Beilby, History of British Birds, 251. »

67     For Mark Catesby’s acclaimed work on migration (his ‘Of Birds of Passage’ paper in Philosophical Transactions, 1747), see Shepard Krech III, ‘Mark Catesby’s “Of Birds of Passage”’, in The Curious Mister Catesby: A ‘Truly Ingenious’ Naturalist Explores New Worlds, ed. E. Charles Nelson and David J. Elliott (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015). »

68     This is very well summarized in a table in Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds, 154–5. »

69     See Peter Berthold, Bird Migration: A General Survey, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11. See also Erwin Stresemann, Die Entwicklung der Ornithologie von Aristoteles bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin: Peters, 1951); as Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present, trans. Hans J. and Cathleen Epstein, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 9–12, 287–9, 306–8. »

70     Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds, 157–71. »

71     Stresemann, Ornithology from Aristotle to the Present, 11. See Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds, 136–9, for a good account of Aristotle and the Holy Roman emperor Frederick II, who observed the v-formation of cranes and corrected the myth of the barnacle goose. »

72     See again Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds, 146–53, for the correspondence between White and Barrington/Pennant, and for Richard Mabey’s theory of why White clung tenaciously to hibernation. Shepard H. Krech III puts forward new information on torpidity among hirundines that may help explain why White ‘waffled’. See Krech, ‘Mark Catesby’s “Of Birds of Passage”’, note 67. »

73     Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne [1789], ed. Paul Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Letter 23 to Thomas Pennant, 59. In Letter 33 to Pennant of 26 November 1770, however, he wrote of the appearance of summer birds of passage in Gibraltar as ‘a presumptive proof of their emigrations’. »

74     Ibid., Letter 18 to Daines Barrington, 143. See also Letter 12 to Thomas Pennant, 36: ‘I acquiesce entirely in your opinion — that, though most of the swallow kind may migrate, yet that some do stay behind and hide with us during the winter’; and see Letter 12 to Daines Barrington, 128. »

75     Ibid., Letter 12 to Thomas Pennant, 36. »

76     See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 33–4. The information from Sir Charles Wager on seeing swallows on the rigging of ships was one convincing argument Collinson put forward in favour of migration. See also the account of John Coakley Lettsom’s dream of Collinson in a grotto in Elysium with replumaged swallows emerging from a horn of plenty, ibid., 164. »

77     Alan W. Armstrong, ed., ‘Forget not Mee & My Garden . . .’: Selected Letters, 1725–1768, of Peter Collinson, FRS (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2002), 248. »

78     Ibid., 249. »

79     Ibid., 249–50. »

80     Buffon experimented by placing swallows in an icehouse to check for torpidity; other experiments included baron von Pernau’s proposal to cut off a toe from a nightingale and fieldfare to identify returning birds. See Birkhead, The Wisdom of Birds, 162–3. »

81     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 153–4, 158–9, 162, 190. »

82     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 5 to Daines Barrington, 112. »

83     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Valeriana officinalis, fascicle 6, no. 67, 3, 8. »

84     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 285: ‘At Blenheim, at least, the Duke of Marlborough had forbidden his servants to disturb the birds who nested in the shrubbery, though they were allowed to shoot them if they hopped over the wall into the kitchen garden.’ »

85     Ibid., 98, 139, 190. »

86     Quoted ibid., 127. »

87     For allusions to the warfare of the hunt, see, for example, Tom Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-century England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), chapter 6; and Robert Williams, ‘Rural Economy and the Antique in the English Landscape Garden’, Journal of Garden History, VII/1 (January–March 1987), 73–96. »

88     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 79, with note by Foster alluding to natural means ‘as we do cats against mice’. »

89     Quoted in Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 169. »

90     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, 182. »

91     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 119–20, 176. »

92     Thomas, The Ends of Life, 255; see also Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 128–9, and 282–4 for the discussion of women’s engagement with natural history in the context of home and garden. »

93     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 128. »

94     See G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-century Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 231 and 234; Cavendish is quoted frequently by Thomas in Man and the Natural World to show that she went beyond this female viewpoint, indeed rejecting the whole anthropocentric tradition. »

95     Quoted in Jane Brown, My Darling Heriott: Henrietta Luxborough, Poetic Gardener and Irrepressible Exile (London: Harper Press, 2006), front matter. »

96     Eleazar Albin, A Natural History of English Song-Birds and Such of the Foreign as are usually brought over and esteemed for the singing (London, 1737), 16. »

97     Francesca Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, 3 vols (London: Century, 1986–9) [vol. I: 1751–73; vol. II: 1774–83; vol. III: 1784–93], II, 471. »

98     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 10 to Thomas Pennant of 4 August 1767, 31; see also Letter 15 to Pennant of 30 March 1768, 41. »

99     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 69. For White’s place in the history of ecology, see, for example, Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977). »

100     For the contrast between The Natural History of Selborne and White’s own records, see Paul G. M. Foster, Gilbert White and his Records: A Scientific Biography (London: Christopher Helm, 1988), preface, ix. Foster points out in the introduction, 4, that White’s activity is set against a backdrop: ‘the enormous gap between the rich and poor, and the sheer brutality of the period’. »

101     See White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, for the extensive footnote to Letter 5 to Thomas Pennant, 252–4. »

102     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 284–6. »

103     Cited in John Phibbs, ‘The Persistence of Older Traditions in Eighteenth-century Gardening’, Garden History, XXXVII/2 (Winter 2009), 179. »

104     Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 139: the 60-foot margin in which the pheasant spends most of its time is maximized in clumps and in a ‘thin linear strip . . . a belt’. »

105     See Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 274–6, for discussion of ‘warring against species’, on the one hand, and embryonic species conservation, on the other. »

106     See again Phibbs, ‘The Persistence of Older Traditions in Eighteenth-century Gardening’, 179. »

107     Cited in Brown, My Darling Heriott, 182–3. »

108     See Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 20, for an account of Shenstone’s Sunday evening openings of The Leasowes and his attempts to prevent flower-cropping by his Edicts, and for William Chambers’s complaints of statues pelted, buildings marred by ‘graffiti’, and the trampling of flowerbeds; see also Williamson, Polite Landscapes, 68: ‘Philip Southcote was obliged to close his famous gardens at Wooburn Farm after “savages, who came as connoisseurs, scribbled a thousand brutalities in the buildings”.’ »

109     Curtis, Flora Londinensis, vol. 1, preface. »

110     See Graham Gibberd, ‘The Location of William Curtis’s London Botanic Garden in Lambeth’, Garden History, XIII/1 (Spring 1985), 9–16. »

111     See John Claudius Loudon’s use of the term ‘progressive’ (with the ‘treason to nature’ in denying progress) in the preface to the Magazine of Natural History, and Journal of Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology and Meteorology, VII (1834). »

112     Catherine Horwood, Gardening Women: Their Stories from 1600 to the Present (London: Virago, 2010), 187. »

113     Loudon, Magazine of Natural History, VII, preface. See Mark Laird, ‘John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843) and the Field’s Identity’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 34 (3), July–September 2014, 248–53. »

114     For a discussion of Richard Bradley’s role, a hundred years before Loudon, in founding the first British journal covering the science of agriculture and horticulture, A General Treatise of Husbandry and Gardening (1721–4), see John Edmondson, ‘Richard Bradley (c. 1688–1732): An Annotated Bibliography, 1710–1818’, Archives of Natural History, XXIX/2 (October 2002), 177. For Collinson, who wrote that his ‘Little Essays’ in the Gentleman’s Magazine were placed anonymously or under a pseudonym ‘because I do not Love Popularity’, see O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 36. »

115     Ray Desmond, ‘Loudon and Nineteenth-century Horticultural Journalism’, in John Claudius Loudon and the Early Nineteenth Century in Great Britain, ed. Elisabeth B. MacDougall (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1980), 79–97. »

116     Loudon, Magazine of Natural History, VIII (1835), preface. »

117     See Melanie Louise Simo, Loudon and the Landscape: From Country Seat to Metropolis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 10, 14, 132, 236. Loudon’s target audience extended from working people to young people, including young women. He was the first to publish Ruskin’s writings in volume VII of his Magazine of Natural History (1834), when Ruskin was just fifteen. For the Gardener’s Magazine, see again Desmond, ‘Loudon and Nineteenth-century Horticultural Journalism’, 81. »

118     For a discussion of access to books through 6,500 reading institutions in 1821, see Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 9. »

119     There is a good discussion of gardeners and pay in chapter 6, ‘Gardeners’, in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, The London Town Garden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001), 151–60. »

120     Simo, Loudon and the Landscape, 154–7. For comparisons of wages against commodities, see Laird, ‘The Culture of Horticulture’, 227–8. For identifications between humans and animals, see Ritvo, The Animal Estate, 14–17, and for ‘inferior humans’ akin to beasts (savages, the American Indian, the Irish, infants, women, the poor and the mad), see Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 41–50. The only consolation for labourers was that they ‘ruled over domestic animals’ and hence were ‘not at the absolute bottom of the social scale’ (ibid., 50). »

121     Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 455–60. »

122     Ibid., 106: ‘Politeness was created through the convivial patterns of social exchange, what Steele called “The Commerce of Discourse”, that occurred in polite society’. »

123     Ibid., 76–9 and passim. See also Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-century Bluestockings (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2008). »

124     See Margaret Wills, Gibside and the Bowes Family (Newcastle: The Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1995). »

125     Edmondson, ‘Novelty in Nomenclature’, 201. »

126     Trevor Lummis and Jan Marsh, The Woman’s Domain: Women and the English Country House (London: Viking, 1990), 82. »

127     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Stachys palustris, fascicle 3, no. 35, 35, 125, 208. Curtis wrote that Galeopsis speciosa (fascicle 6, no. 70, 38, 115) was in corn in parts of Yorkshire, but ‘the fields about London are exempt from it’. »

128     Thomas, The Ends of Life, 53. »

129     See Graham Parry, ‘John Evelyn as Hortulan Saint’, in Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land, ed. Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (Leicester and London: Leicester University Press, 1992), especially 137 and 145: ‘The Hartlib circle generally was familiar with these millenarian expectations, and the Utopian schemes generated in that milieu owed something to the belief that man’s capacity for improvement was increasing fast.’ »

130     For ‘taste’ and ‘politeness’, see Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 88–111. »

131     See Michael Walters, ‘Birds Depicted in a Folio of Eighteenth Century Water-Colours by Sarah Stone’, Archives of Natural History, XXXI/1 (April 2004), 123–49. See also Christine E. Jackson, Sarah Stone: Natural Curiosities from the New Worlds (London: Merrell Holberton/Natural History Museum, 1998). »

132     See Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi, ‘ “La femminil pazienza”: Women Painters and Natural History in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries’, in The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400–1850, ed. Therese O’Malley and Amy R. W. Meyers (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2008), 158–85. »

133     Jane Wildgoose’s remarkable evocation of the Portland Museum for the exhibition Mrs Delany and her Circle at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven (24 September 2009 to 3 January 2010), is recorded in her publication Promiscuous Assemblage . . . (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2009). »

134     William Gilpin to Mary Delany, 8 May 1786, Oxford, Bodleian MS Eng. Letters, b.27, fols 53–4. »

135     Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 4th edn, 4 vols (London, 1786), II, 242. »

136     It should be noted, that, while my book points to book publishing, based on subscriptions, as part of a wider exchange of knowledge, commodities and favours, it does not deal with a larger history of the ‘gift’. See Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990); Alan D. Schrift, The Logic of the Gift (New York and London: Routledge, 1997); and Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). For discussion of instrumental and non-instrumental or affectionate friendships, see Thomas, The Ends of Life, chapter 6: ‘Friendship and Sociability’. »

137     William Gilpin to Mary Delany, 9 November 1785 and 25 January 1786, respectively, in Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Llanover, VI, 306, 340. Gilpin was alluding to Aesop’s ‘The Mountain in Labour’: ‘A MOUNTAIN was once greatly agitated. Loud groans and noises were heard; and crowds of people came from all parts to see what was the matter. While they were assembled in anxious expectation of some terrible calamity, out came a Mouse.’ Moral: Don’t make much ado about nothing. »

138     See Paul Foster’s very good account, ‘Distractions, 1775–1788’, in Gilbert White and his Records, 138–46, and especially 138 and 146. »

139     Ibid., 132, 130. »

140     Paul Foster’s introduction to White, The Natural History of Selborne, xxii. »

141     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 5 to Daines Barrington, 112. »

142     Quakers were ‘celebrated for producing a quite disproportionate number of botanists, plant-collectors and nurserymen’, writes Keith Thomas in Man and the Natural World, 237. »

143     For this and all statistics in the paragraph, see White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, n. 7, 252–4. »

144     Richard B. Stothers, ‘The Great Dry Fog of 1783’, Climate Change, XXXII (1996), 79; and see Clive Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 276. »

145     Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 61. »

146     Curtis, Flora Londinenis: Caltha palustris, fascicle 1, no. 7, 40, 114. »

147     Ibid., Moenchia erecta, fascicle 2, no. 22, 12, 34, 136. »

148     Paul Foster provides a good account of how White’s brother-in-law, Thomas Barker of Lyndon Hall, Rutland, provided an impetus for weather recording as initiated in the Garden-Kalendar in 1751. See Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 18–20. »

149     See Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), 128–43, for a discussion of initiatives from the grand duke to Lamarck. »

150     Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, preface, xii–xiii. »

151     Ibid., 206. »

152     Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 110. There were, of course, umbrellas in England more than a hundred years before the patent was taken out by John Beale. »

153     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, advertisement: ‘If the writer should at all appear to have induced any of his readers to pay a more ready attention to the wonders of the Creation, too frequently overlooked as common occurrences . . . his purpose will be fully answered.’ See Letter 17 to Thomas Pennant, 46, for an account of the toad: ‘How wonderful is the economy of Providence with regard to the limbs of so vile a reptile!’ »

154     Foster, Gilbert White and his Records, 7. »

155     White, The Natural History of Selborne, 247–8. »

156     Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment, 45. »

157     See John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Esmond S. de Beer, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), II, 207–8. »

158     Mark Laird, ‘ “Perpetual Spring” or Tempestuous Fall: The Greenhouse and the Great Storm of 1703 in the Life of John Evelyn and his Contemporaries’, Garden History, XXXIV/2 (Winter 2006), 153–73. »

159     Quoted in Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 133. »

160     Entry for 3 October 1777. See Greenoak, ed., The Journals of Gilbert White, II, 191. »

161     See Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, 4–6. »

162     See Hubert Damisch, Théorie du nuage: pour une histoire de la peinture (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), 267–9; and see Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds, chapter 11: ‘Goethe and Constable’. »

163     Stephen Daniels, ‘Great Balls of Fire: Envisioning the Brilliant Meteor of 1783’, in Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds: Geography and the Humanities, ed. Daniels et al. (London: Routledge, 2010), 155–69. »

164     Loudon, Magazine of Natural History, VIII (1835), preface. See Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 18–19, and Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 281–2. »

165     Curtis, Flora Londinensis, vol. i, preface. »

166     Ibid., Pulmonaria maritima (Mertensia maritima), fascicle 6, no. 72, 18, 54. »

167     Ibid., Antirrhinum linaria var. peloria (now Linaria vulgaris peloric form), fascicle 6, no. 69, 41, 125. »

168     Curtis refers to the doctrine of signatures in the context of Saxifraga granulata (ibid., fascicle 1, no. 9, 30, 80) being ‘unphilosophically’ introduced into the Materia medica (the body of collected knowledge about the medical properties of substances used in healing). He had a no-nonsense stance: for example, on Epilobium adnatum (fascicle 2, no. 22, 23, 66, 131): ‘The farmer has no reason to complain of it; nor is it celebrated in the annals of physic’; and on Polygonum minus (fascicle 1, no. 1, 28, 77): ‘At present it does not appear that it has any thing more than its scarcity to recommend it to our notice.’ »

169     Ibid., Agrostemma githago, fascicle 3, no. 35, 27, 92, 209. »

170     Ibid., Alopecurus pratensis, fascicle 5, no. 50, 5, 17, 296. »

171     Ibid., Aira aquatica (now Catabrosa aquatica), fascicle 1, no. 10, 5, 12, 55. »

172     See ibid., Rumex acutus (now Rumex sanguineus), fascicle 3, no. 31, 21, 62, 181: ‘Camberwell Grove is at present a good Habitat for it.’ This meant a place where it grows abundantly rather than a ‘particular place of growth’, such as wet or shaded places. ‘Shrubbery’ was used sparingly, as in Hedera helix, fascicle 1, no. 8, 16, 43. »

173     See, for example, Curtis’s entry for Centunculus minimus (now Anagallis minima): ‘The first time of my discovering the Centunculus minimus was this summer, when herbarizing in company with Mr. DYER’. It was on Ashford Common. Ibid., fascicle 3, no. 31, 11, 32, 185. »

174     See the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds website for discussion of ‘aftermath grazing’ as a way to bring back floristic diversity into hay meadows: www.rspb.org.uk. »

175     See, for example, Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems (New York: Anchor, 1996). »

176     Quoted in Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 128. »

177     Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fols 55 and 236v; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 87, 309. »

178     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 35 to Daines Barrington, 182–3. »

179     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 69. »

180     Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol, 236v; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 309: ‘We have dissected them & found their rews of teeth, which we reserve in papers to shew, & you may sometimes heare them crackle as they feede.’ See Michael C. Houck and M. J. Cody, Wild in the City: A Guide to Portland’s Natural Areas (Portland, OR: Oregon Historical Society Press, 2000), 123. More than 27,000 ‘teeth’ are documented today in the radula of slugs like the banana slug, Ariolimax columbianus: ‘The organ acts like a file and allows the slug to rasp away at its food much as sandpaper removes paint from the surface. These “teeth” are worn away and constantly replaced.’ »

181     See White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 35 to Daines Barrington, 260, n. 18. »

182     For a good account of the duchess collecting land and freshwater shells at Bulstrode, see Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 76. Whether Helix lucorum, illustrated by her gardener-cum-illustrator, J. Agnew, caused the havoc of the garden snail, H. aspersa, is unclear. »

183     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 14 to Daines Barrington, 131. »

184     Quoted in Henry Power, ‘Virgil’s Georgics and the Poetic Landscape of the English Civil War’, in Interlacing Words and Things: Bridging the Nature–Culture Opposition in Gardens and Landscapes, ed. Stephen Bann (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2012), 51 onwards. »

185     Marjorie Williams, The Letters of William Shenstone (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939), 285. »

186     Thomas, The Ends of Life, 98–9. »

187     Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour: An Epistle to Mr Stephen Duck (London, 1739), 12. »

188     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 4 to Daines Barrington, 110. »

189     See Pat Rogers, ‘Bentinck, Margaret Cavendish [Lady Margaret Cavendish Harley], Duchess of Portland (1715–1786)’, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40752 [accessed 1 October 2013]. She wrote of the auction: ‘The aim was to recoup the family fortunes, drained by the electioneering expenses of her elder son and the high living of the younger.’ Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, speculates on the stipulation in the duchess’s will that the collections be sold. »

190     Quoted in Thomas, The Ends of Life, 255. »

191     See David Wilkinson, The Duke of Portland: Politics and Party in the Age of George III (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 61–2. See Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 220–21, for discussion of debts and bankruptcy. »

192     See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 146–7. After Collinson was widowed in 1753, he had to come to an accommodation with his inheriting son, Michael Collinson, to stay on at Ridgeway House for the remainder of his life (some fifteen years). »

193     Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), chapter 2, ‘Dower and the Rule of No Dower of a Trust’, 53–4. »

194     Lummis and Marsh, The Woman’s Domain, 76. »

195     See Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 249. »

196     Sir William Blackstone et al., Commentaries on the Laws of England [1765–9] (London, 1827), book 2, 96. »

197     Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property, 27–37. »

198     See Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 218–22, for a nuanced account of widowhood as the ‘female condition most visible to history’ and of the ‘considerable comforts of a rich widowhood’. See also Devoney Looser, Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). »

199     Quoted in Power, ‘Virgil’s Georgics’, 58. »

200     Jennifer Munroe argues in her essay ‘ “My innocent diversion of gardening”: Mary Somerset’s Plants’, Renaissance Studies, XXV/1 (February 2011), 111–23, that the split between manuscript and print knowledge, between the amateur and the professional, helps to account for the lack of recognition of women’s contribution to early science. »

201     See O’Neill and McLean, Peter Collinson, 154 and 167–8. In 1815 an issue of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine still described her as ‘an early encourager of the science of Botany’, but Dandy remarked in 1958 on published references to Badminton being ‘so few and so slight’. See J. E. Dandy, ed., The Sloane Herbarium (London: Natural History Museum, 1958), 209. »

202     Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells, 265–7. »

203     See Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), epilogue: ‘The Garden in Time’, 270–86, for a good account of how a culture of flowers was erased: ‘In the historicizing gardens of the first decades of the twentieth century, the Italian garden was similarly interpreted as architectonic and formal, primarily through the use of box, shaped into massive, precisely trimmed, and architectural patterns, hedges, and topiary’ (268). »

204     Horace Walpole, writing about ‘Ladies and Gentlemen Distinguished by Their Artistic Talents’ in Anecdotes of Painting, is discussed by Kim Sloan, ‘Mrs Delany’s Paintings and Drawings’, in Mrs Delany and her Circle, ed. Laird and Weisberg-Roberts, 110. »

205     Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modern Landscape (London: Architectural Press, 1938). »

206     Horwood, Gardening Women. »

207     The entry ‘Somerset, Mary, Duchess of Beaufort (bap. 1630, d. 1715)’ by P. E. Kell (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; online edition: http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40544 [accessed 1 October 2013]) is representative of a corrected imbalance since J. E. Dandy wrote in 1958: ‘D.N.B. gives her no separate entry’. By comparison, Jenny Uglow’s A Little History of British Gardening (London: Pimlico, 2005), which has more on women gardeners than Miles Hadfield in his A History of British Gardening (London: John Murray, 1979), still gives only one paragraph to the duchess of Beaufort in a chapter of thirteen pages devoted to General Fairfax, Andrew Marvell, Ralph Austen, John Evelyn, Thomas Hanmer and John Rea. »

208     In the context of Mary Delany and Margaret Bentinck, see, for example, Lisa L. Moore, Sister Acts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). »

209     My term ‘Sisters of the Spade’ is invented but derives its meaning from Adam’s symbol, the spade, and the Collinson/Custis correspondence, see E. G. Swem, Brothers of the Spade: Correspondence of Peter Collinson, of London, and of John Custis, of Williamsburg, Virginia, 1734–1746 (Barre, Mass.: Barre Gazette, 1957). »

210     Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 8; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 29. »

211     Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 10–10v; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 33–4. »

212     The epitaph for Mary Delany, written by Bishop Hurd, is in St James’s Church, Piccadilly, on the north wall. »

213     Thomas, The Ends of Life, 235–45. »

214     Cordelia, speaking of Lear’s crown of weeds, in King Lear, IV, iv, lines 3–6. »

215     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Phallus impudicus, fascicle 3, no. 33, 72, 218, 199. »

216     Ibid., Ligustrum vulgare, fascicle 5, no. 51, 1, 3, 300; ibid., Lychnis flos-cuculi, fascicle 1, no. 2, 33, 91; ibid., Saxifraga oppositifolia, fascicle 6, no. 68, 27, 83. »

217     Love’s Labour’s Lost, V, II, lines 883–6:
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight »

218     Dedication to vol. I of Flora Londinensis (1777). »

219     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Spergula saginoides (now Sagina subulata), fascicle 4, no. 40, 35, 89, 139. »

220     See also, for example, the entry on nipplewort for ‘sore nipples’, ibid., Lapsana communis, fascicle 1, no. 10, 59, 166, 56. Quoting Peter Jonas Bergius’s Materia medica on Saponaria officinalis (fascicle 2, no. 17, 29, 82) Curtis wrote in Flora Londinensis: ‘In baths and lotions, it has been made use of to cleanse and beautify the skin: Internally the decoction of the whole herb is sudorific, and promotes the menses.’ »

221     Aside from the evidence of the subscription, no reference to the duchess of Portland has been found in Curtis’s entries on plants. »

222     Shteir, Cultivating Women, 55. »

223     See Maureen H. Lazarus and Heather S. Pardoe, ‘Bute’s Botanical Tables: Dictated by Nature’, Archives of Natural History, XXXVI/2 (2009), 285–94; See also George S. Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill: The Man Destroyed by Ambition in the Era of Celebrity (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh Press, and Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012), 271–9 and appendix B, which discounts Bute’s sustained patronage of all twenty-six volumes of Hill’s Vegetable System. »

224     The duchess of Portland’s copy is now in the Oak Spring Garden Library, Upperville, VA, having passed through Crewe Hall, Cheshire. »

225     For Shute Barrington, see Laird, The Flowering of the Landscape Garden, 376; for Lord Macartney, see Laird, ‘Plantings’, 70. »

226     John Stuart, 3rd earl of Bute, Botanical Tables (self-published as twelve sets, 1785), ‘Volume I — British Plants, Tables. General Plan’, 6. I am grateful to Tony Willis at Oak Spring Garden Library for checking this. »

227     Shteir, Cultivating Women, chapters 3, 4 and 5, and especially p. 61. »

228     See Alison E. Martin, ‘Society, Creativity and Science: Mrs Delany and the Art of Botany’, review essay in Eighteenth-century Life, XXXV/2 (Spring 2011), 102–7. See also Sam George, Botany, Sexuality and Women’s Writing, 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). »

229     See Rousseau, The Notorious Sir John Hill, 243–5. »

230     Joseph Banks’s acknowledgement, in his early botanical formation, of the influence of a woman collecting ‘simples’ near Eton stands out as a late instance of the power of a female knowledge that was soon to vanish. This is cited by Shteir, Cultivating Women, ‘The Herbal Tradition’, 37–9; for Lindley, see chapter 6: ‘Defeminizing the Budding Science of Botany, 1830–1860’, 149–69. »

231     See Horwood, Gardening Women, 35, and 42–7 for discussion of women and the Royal Horticultural Society. David. E. Allen’s index to The Naturalist in Britain includes some significant women collectors, notably Mary Anning (collecting fossils in Lyme Regis) and Mary Wyatt, who produced an album of pressed seaweeds, Algae Danmonienses, under the supervision of Mrs A. W. Griffiths. Yet, apart from Isabella Gifford’s The Marine Biologist of 1840 and Margaret Gatty’s British Seaweeds of 1863 (and a sentimental literature of flowers), an equivalent literature to that of Jane Loudon or Gertrude Jekyll is lacking. For women and scientific societies in the nineteenth century and for Anna Thynne as heir to Bulstrode’s breakfast-room science, see Allen, The Naturalist in Britain, 150–52 and 118. »

232     See Susan W. Lanman, ‘Colour in the Garden: “Malignant Magenta” ’, Garden History, XXVIII/2 (Winter 2000), 209–21. »

233     Reflections on ‘colony collapse disorder’ are to be found in Markus Imhoof’s extraordinary documentary, More Than Honey (2012). »

234     See Mark Laird, ‘Sayes Court Revisited’, in John Evelyn and his Milieu, ed. Frances Harris and Michael Hunters (London: The British Library, 2003), 136. For a broad discussion of women’s role in domestic husbandry, see Horwood, Gardening Women, 141–50. »

235     Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 238–9; see also Elizabeth Hyde, Cultivated Power: Flowers, Culture and Politics in the Reign of Louis XIV (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), chapter 1, and especially 19–20. »

236     Evelyn, ‘Elysium Britannicum’, fol. 236; see also Evelyn, Elysium Britannicum, ed. Ingram, 308. »

237     Curtis, Flora Londinensis: Lonicera periclymenum, fascicle 1, no. 1, 15, 42. »

238     Charles Nelson, in a personal communication of October 2012, noted that the coating was, initially, the excretions of aphids (‘honeydew’), which, collecting dust, might then have been covered with microscopic fungi. »

239     Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World, 269, 291. »

240     See Richard Mabey, Gilbert White: A Biography of the Author of The Natural History of Selborne (London: Century, 1986), 109, quoting Daines Barrington’s suggestion to White: ‘it may also be proper to take notice of the common prognostics of the weather from animals, plants, or hygroscopes, and compare them afterwards with the table of the weather, from which it may be perceived how far such prognostics can be relied upon’. See Daines Barrington, The Naturalist’s Journal (London, 1767), preface, first published anonymously. »

241     Oppenheimer, Eruptions that Shook the World, chapter 14: explosive eruption near a major city; volcanogenic pollution crisis; and ‘super-eruption’ scenario. »

242     Ibid., 330. »

243     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 61 to Daines Barrington, 237. Paul Foster comments in his note how these were ‘originally written as four letters; at a late editorial stage a long letter on winter weather was subdivided into three and the total became six’. »

244     Paul Foster’s discussion of White’s construction is covered in Note for the Reader. See, for example, the ‘unexpected reverse of comparative local cold’ with the consequences for his evergreens — as compared to those in nearby Newton; or the thermometer tip-off that led them to put roots and fruits in ‘cellar, and warm closets’. Compare these entries in White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 63 to Barrington, 244–5, with Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, III, 66–7: ‘Thomas Hoar shook the snow carefully off from the evergreens . . . Bread, cheese, meat, potatoes, apples all frozen, where not secured in cellars under ground’. »

245     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster. In Letter 9 to Daines Barrington (ibid., 123), White expounded a ‘presumptive argument’: that nightingales do not reach the west of England because of the migratory route over the narrower reaches of the Channel. In Letter 2 (ibid., 105), he logged the nightingale’s song as mid-April to the end of June, but in Letter 10 (ibid., 124–5), he reported that his neighbour with a ‘nice ear’ failed to record the key of the nightingale’s rapid notes. In more recent research (reported in The Independent, 29 June 2010), a ‘data logger’ attached to a male nightingale ‘OAD’ confirmed its south-eastern English sojourn, its African winter destination (Guinea-Bissau), but also the very short season in the UK: mid-April to late July. White appears to have believed, within his observations, that certain things might always remain the mysteries of the Creator; hence he wrote on the lack of maternal affection in the cuckoo in Letter 4 to Daines Barrington, 110: ‘the methods of Providence are not subjected to any mode or rule, but astonish us in new lights’. »

246     See, for example, his entry for 5 September 1784, in Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, III, 53: ‘I saw lately a small Ichneumon-fly attack a spider much larger than itself on a grass-walk. When the spider made any resistance the Ichneumon apply’d her tail to him, & stung him with great vehemence, so that he soon became dead, & motionless. The Ich: then running backward drew her prey very nimbly over the walk into the standing grass. This spider would be deposited in some hole where the Ich: would lay some eggs; & as soon as the eggs were hatch’d, the carcase would afford ready food for the maggots. Perhaps some eggs might be injected into the body of the spider in the act of stinging. Some Ich: deposit their eggs in the aureliae of butterflies, & moths.’ »

247     White, The Natural History of Selborne, ed. Foster, Letter 64 to Daines Barrington, 246. »

248     Greenoak, ed., Journals of Gilbert White, III, 93–104. »

249     Ibid., 1, 104. »

250     Ibid., III, 365. »

251     For the current status of the field cricket, see http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/species-of-theday/biodiversity/endangered-species/gryllus-campestris/index.html (accessed 7 September 2013). See also Norman Maclean, ed., Silent Summer: The State of Wildlife in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 534–5. Relevant is the discussion of the southern hawker (Aeshna cyanea) spreading northwards, apparently due to rising temperatures (478–9), and the resilience of English wasps (Vespula vulgaris, 548) in contrast to the drastic decline in bumblebees (415–29). This decline is linked to the ‘loss of -97% of all species-rich grasslands (hay meadows, calcareous grasslands) in the last 60 years’ (415). »