Garden History Society collection

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The collection

A collection of material on the history of landscape, garden design, horticulture and conservation assembled and owned by the Gardens Trust (formerly the Garden History Society).

Notable books in the collection include:

The earliest book in the collection is A new herball or historie of plant, 1586.
The Flower Garden, 1839 with its hand-coloured plates.
A general treatise of agriculture, both philosophical and practical; displaying the arts of husbandry and gardening. Printed in 1756.
Catalogue for 1842, a choice collection of floricultural, vegetable & agricultural seeds. A seed catalogue compiled by James Carter a seedsman and florist.
The Garden : an illustrated weekly journal of gardening in all its branches

Within the main collection are a number of books from notable collectors including Basil Williams, John Anthony, Jill Collett and John Harvey’s books on flowers and garden history.

The collector

The Garden History Society was founded in 1966 to study garden history and to protect historic gardens. Since 2015 the Society became part of The Gardens Trust.

Acquisition

The Society donated part of its Library to the University in 1998.

Access

The majority of the collection is borrowable and can be found in the Kings Manor Library.

A small collection of books are in the Rare Books Collection and may be consulted at the Borthwick Institute for Archives.

Kings Manor Library also houses a collection of uncatalogued slides from the Garden History Society.

The entire collection can be searched using the provence term Garden History Society (Great Britain) in YorSearch, the Library catalogue.

Related collections

The Borthwick Institute for Archives holds a number of archives on gardening and horticulture.

The Digital Library has several collections of digitised images on gardens.

Garden History images
Digitised glass slides of the Backhouse plant nursery, Holgate York. The original slides are held by the Borthwick.

Further information

The University of Bath also houses the Trust’s collections.

Find out more about the The Gardens Trust.