Enfilade

Happy National Arbor Day!

Distributed for the Bodleian Library by The University of Chicago Press:

Stephen Harris, Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum: A Brief History (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2017), 144 pages, ISBN: 978  18512  44652, £15 / $25.

The Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest surviving botanic garden in Britain, occupying the same location in central Oxford since 1621. Designed as a nursery for growing medicinal plants amid the turmoil of the civil war, and nurtured through the restoration of the monarchy, it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a curious past.

This book tells the story of the garden through accounts of each of its keepers, tracing their work and priorities, from its founding keeper, Jacob Bobart, through to the early nineteenth-century partnership of gardener William Baxter and academic Charles Daubeny, who together gave the garden its greenhouse and ponds and helped ensure its survival to the present. Richly illustrated, this book offers a wonderful introduction to a celebrated Oxford site.

Stephen A. Harris is the Druce Curator of the Oxford University Herbaria and a University Research Lecturer. He is the author, most recently, of What Have Plants Ever Done for Us?, also published by the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.