About the Book
Familiar Garden Flowers appeared from Cassell in five series between 1879 and the mid-1890s: some two hundred garden flowers, each given a full-page colour plate drawn by F. Edward Hulme and an essay by Shirley Hibberd, the most famous garden writer of the Victorian age. The chromolithographed plates — reproduced here from the original pages — made it the best-loved flower book of its era.
Hibberd's essays are miniature masterpieces of Victorian garden writing: part botany, part folklore, part practical advice, and part sermon on the worth of common things. 'The blue sky and the green earth cannot be monopolised,' he wrote; the familiar flowers belonged to everyone.
This digital edition unites all five series in one site for the first time — every essay, and one hundred seventy-nine of the colour plates restored from scans of the original volumes — browsable series by series, exactly as the Victorian subscriber collected them.