Catalogues of Plants in the Dublin Society’s Botanic Garden, at Glasnevin

Part of Cambridge Library Collection – Botany and Horticulture.  A paperback reprint of some early C19 publications.

This plant catalogue is in two parts. The first, published in 1801, provides a list, organised according to the Linnaean system, of the hothouse and greenhouse plants in the newly established Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin, near Dublin, and the second, from 1802, is a guide to all the plants in the gardens, including the arboretum and ‘Hortus tinctoria’, where dye plants (important for the Irish linen industry) were displayed, arranged according to the layout of the different beds, and giving their Linnaean and common names.

Both parts are believed to have been written by Walter Wade (1740–1825), a physician and enthusiastic botanist who had lobbied for the establishment of a botanical garden on the site of the former property of Thomas Tickell, poet and government administrator in Ireland. The gardens were inaugurated in 1795, and these catalogues form the earliest evidence of their considerable holdings of native and exotic plants.