Seeds, Plants & Bulbs. Kelway's Manual for 1897. (Click for more images)
Catalogue of Choice Seeds. 1909. (Click for more images)
Sutton's Peas. 1895. (Click for more images)
Seed catalogues from the turn of the twentieth century offer many named varieties of edible peas and flowering sweet peas. The scans here show Kelway’s sweet peas of 1897, before the waved ‘Countess Spencer’ variety took the gardening world by storm in 1901, and Thompson & Morgan’s sweet pea list from 1909. The OSU collection also contains an album of Sutton’s edible peas from the late 1890s. (See Appendix II: Photographs in Catalogues).
Catalogue of Florists' Flowers, Hardy Border Plants &c. 1905. (Click for more images)
"Holland in Ireland." Robertson's Irish Grown Daffodils and Tulips. 1900. (Click for more images)
Price List. Alpine and Herbaceous Plants, Shrubs, &c., Grown at Lissadell. 1913.
Illustrated & Complete Floral Guide of Plants for 1900. (Click for more images)
From Scotland, the 1905 Florist’s Flowers and Border Plants catalogue of John Forbes contains plans for perennial borders composed of plants he could provide. Several Irish firms from this period are represented in the collection. The Hogg & Robertson and Wm. Baylor Hartland catalogues advertise Irish-grown bulbs as superior to those imported from Holland, and the Lissadell nursery stocked an immense selection of daffodils, alpines and herbaceous plants.1
Special features of the 1900 Floral Guide of H. Cannell are the detailed shipping and export terms available to customers across the British Empire at the turn of the century, and testimonials from the colonies. They also devoted several pages to a list of their royal and noble patrons, a practice which was typical of the time, but which became less common after the First World War.
Notes
- See the website of the Lissadell House, Sligo, Ireland for information on the history of the estate and its association with the poet W.B. Yeats: http://www.lissadellhouse.com