A Medicine to the Mind

February 5, 2021 – May 2, 2021

Early gardening catalogs are windows into our horticultural past. Their study unites a variety of disciplines: botany, the history of social and economic development, as well as garden and art history. Very few of the thousands of nursery and seedsmen’s yearly catalogs issued over the centuries have survived. Closely aligned with the history of printing these rare documents provide insights into the development of plant varieties and helps us to understand which ones withstood the test of time and how gardening fashions changed. They also show the evolution of printmaking materials and techniques used by commercial nurseries and contain beautiful examples of the art of the plant world.