Kew Gardens: Or, A Popular Guide to the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew

A reprint of a classical work in the Cambridge Library Collection.

The eminent British botanist Sir William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865) expanded and developed the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew into a world-leading centre of research and conservation. Appointed its first full-time director in 1841, Hooker came to Kew following a highly successful period in the chair of botany at Glasgow University. He quickly began to extend the gardens, arranging for the building of the now famous Palm House and establishing the Museum of Economic Botany. Kew Gardens reissues Hooker’s popular guides to the gardens (sixteenth edition) and to the museum (third edition), both published in 1858. Illustrated throughout, these documents reveal the areas and specimens accessible to a receptive Victorian public. Hooker’s ten volumes of Icones Plantarum (1837-54) have also been reissued in this series, along with many works by his son and equally accomplished successor, Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911).