Beschreibung:

LOUDON, Jane Wells (née Webb, 1807-1858). The Ladies' Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals. London: Bradbury and Evans for William Smith 1842. 4° (271 x 210mm). 48 hand-coloured lithographic plates printed by Day & Haghe. (Largely disbound, some light browning to plates, a few with small tears to outer margins.) Provenance : P.André (booklabel). Cf. Nissen BBI 1234 (edition of 1840). -- The Ladies' Flower-Garden of Ornamental Bulbous Plants. London: Bradbury and Evans for William Smith 1841. 4° (268 x 210mm). 58 hand-coloured lithographic plates printed by Day & Haghe. (Some leaves disbound, a few plates lightly browned or spotted.) FIRST EDITION. Nissen BBI 1235. -- The Ladies' Flower-Garden of Ornamental Perennials. London: Bradbury and Evans for William Smith 1843-1844. 2 volumes, 4° (269 x 208mm). 96 hand-coloured lithographic plates printed by Day & Haghe. (Some plates lightly browned, a few with appreciable spotting.) FIRST EDITION. Nissen BBI 1237. 3 works in four volumes. The first work in contemporary green half morocco gilt, g.e. (spine torn, extrmities rubbed); the remaining works uniformly bound in brown half morocco gilt, g.e. (worn, spines of the third work lacking). Mrs. Loudon began to write botanical works for the amateur to raise funds for her husband, the horticultural writer and botanist John Claudius Loudon who had incurred a ¨10,000 debt in the course of producing his Arboretum et Fruticetum Brittanicum . Her own works proved extremely popular: 20,000 copies of the Ladies' Flower Garden were sold, and by 1879 the work had run into nine editions. The success of her books, however, did not come soon enough to ease her husband's worries: he died in 1843. His wife continued to publish horticultural works, and new editions of her husband's writings, and was granted a pension from the the Civil List in recognition of his work. (4)