Flowering Plants grasses, sedges and ferns of Great Britain, by Anne Pratt 1806 – 1893
PRATT, A., & STEP, E. (1905). Flowering plants, grasses, sedges, & ferns of Great Britain: and their allies the club mosses, horsetails, etc. London, F. Warne
This book is a 1 of a 6 volume series by Anne Pratt who was one of the best known English botanical illustrators of the Victorian age. This edition published in 1905, has a beautiful dark blue green arts and crafts style binding of embossed cloth. The front board has gilt lettering. The beautiful binding on the outside gives a hint of the beauty that is found inside with the many colour illustrations and engaging text.
Anne Pratt composed more than 20 different books, which she illustrated with chromolithographs, on which she collaborated with William Dickes, an engraver skilled in the chromolithograph process. Her works were written in an accessible but accurate style that was partly responsible for the popularising of botany in her day. (1)
A digitised version of this volume can be found online at
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/45133#page/11/mode/1up
Anne Pratt, artist unknown, Wikimedia Commons
The author is credited with generating a lot of interest in the general public in British flora by combining “easily digested science with miscellaneous romantic flower-lore” (Blunt & Stearn). Originally five volumes covering the entire British flora, a sixth supplemental volume, The British Grasses, Sedges, Ferns and their Allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts, and Horsetails, was published in 1873. Pratt begins volume one telling her readers that “one of the chief objects is to aid those who have not hitherto studied Botany”. (2)
There are many references to the use of plants for medicinal purposes as well as folk lore references, poems and information. It is alleged that Queen Victoria herself personally requested copies of all of Pratt’s works. (3)
The Sweet Violet can still be found today amongst waysides, hedgerows and woodland in Gower.
The Swansea botanist Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778 – 1855), whose work Anne Pratt would have known, recorded many examples of the Yellow Welsh poppy amongst the waterfalls of the Neath valley.
References