ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL
WILLIAM CURTIS’S Flora Londinensis, published in instalments between 1777 and 1798, was the first comprehensive book on the flora of the capital and its environs and one of the first to focus on plants in an urban area. Meticulous hand-coloured copperplate illustrations supported a text that described fritillary growing ‘in meadows between Mortlake and Kew’, chicory in Battersea Fields and a rare species of stonecrop on a chapel wall in Kentish Town.
Two centuries earlier, William Turner, ‘the father of British botany’, had noted carpets of bluebells, as well as great burnet and chamomile at Syon. And of 1597, John Gerard wrote of clary growing wild around Gray’s Inn, Holborn, and pennyroyal on a common near Mile End.
