Botany and Gardens in Early Modern Ireland

Emer Lawlor, Elizabethanne Boran, Charles Nelson

• Publisher: Four Courts Press
• Year: 2023
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781801511001
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

This beautifully illustrated book explores sources for botany and gardening in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ireland. It investigates the contributions of individuals such as Philip O'Sullivan Beare and Thomas Molyneux in the seventeenth century, and, for the eighteenth century, focuses on the Revd Caleb Threlkeld, whose Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum (Dublin, 1726) was the first botanical book published in Ireland. Chapters shed light on the books in early eighteenth-century libraries, such as that of Dr. Edward Worth and of Marsh's Library in Dublin, and demonstrate the impact of the explorations of the Dutch East India Company on knowledge of the flora of distant lands. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the glorious botanical works in the Fagel Collection, bought by Trinity College Dublin in 1802. The changing nature of eighteenth-century gardens and landscapes and the factors affecting their growth and renown bring the book to a close.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Foreword
• Table of contents
• List of contributors
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Recollecting Ireland’s flora: botanical information inthe ‘Zoilomastix’ (c.1626) of Philip O’Sullivan Beare
• 2. Irish wild plants before 1690
• 3. The Molyneux brothers, the New Science, andthe Dublin Philosophical Society in the late seventeenth century
• 4. Caleb Threlkeld: dissenting minister, physician and botanist
• 5. Caleb Threlkeld’s plant records
• 6. Caleb Threlkeld, Dublin’s earliest plant ecologist
• 7. Botany and gardens at the Edward Worth Library, Dublin
• 8. ‘If you have a garden in your library, nothing will bewanting’: botany and gardens in the collections of Marsh’s Library, Dublin
• 9. Pleasure gardens and gardening for pleasure in the Fagel collection at Trinity College Dublin
• 10. The Physic Garden at Trinity College Dublin, in the early eighteenth century
• 11. Gardening at Mitchelstown: John K’Eogh’s Botanalogia universalis Hibernica (Cork, 1735)
• 12. Gothic features in eighteenth-century Irish landscapes
• 13. The nursery and seed trade in Dublin before 1800
• 14. Ellen Hutchins (1785–1815), botanist in west Cork: ‘how did her garden grow?’
• Index of plant names
• General index