By David Soden and Jill Tivey.

The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh Library …

Four tall, metal cabinets. The sort common in offices, often filled with stationery items or files.

But not these …

These house an estimated 5-6,000 individual nursery catalogues and related items. Many are from the 19^th Century with a few from the later 1700s. They range from single typed sheets of paper to lavishly produced 200-page booklets with colour plates and photographs. The collection is especially strong on English and Scottish catalogues but also contains many hundreds from elsewhere in Europe and from North America. 

Our project is to expand upon the brief records that already exist for some items and to create new records for those that have none, with the aim of making the catalogues and their contents more accessible to researchers.

Originally produced to advertise and promote nursery businesses and their wares and services, most would have been considered ephemeral items to be discarded when the following year’s catalogues were published. But over time they have become a valuable historical resource of horticultural, botanical and sociological interest.  

Top left: This catalogue with plants “arranged alphabetically according to the Linnaean system” was published by Dickson & Co. in 1794. 

Top right: Portrait photographs of the management team of Dobbie & Co. from their Spring 1898 catalogue. 

Bottom left: Many catalogues were lavishly produced such as this 1891 seed annual from Cox & Co. of California. 

Bottom right: This Dobbie & Co. Catalogue from 1921 gives detailed information on the cultivation of some plants. Here the leek varieties “Dobbie’s International Prize” (as shown in the photograph) and “Musselburgh” have been marked in blue crayon probably as part of an order. 

Some of our catalogues are “working” documents and have been annotated indicating which plants were to be ordered. Tantalisingly, it may be possible to trace some of the plants received to the living and preserved collections. Working in collaboration with these RBGE departments to discover links between the catalogues, living plants and herbarium specimens could be an exciting adjunct to this project.  

Nor is RBGE looking at their nursery catalogues in isolation. The Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) also have collections of nursery catalogues and we will be keeping them updated on how our work is progressing. 

Tasked with cataloguing RBGE’s nursery catalogues are Jill Tivey and David Soden. We both retired from SASA, formerly Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture, in 2023, where Jill was the librarian and David worked in seed certification. For this project, we extract the relevant information from each item in the nursery catalogues collection and add to existing records, or create new ones, on the RBGE catalogue which uses the KOHA open-source integrated library system. Easy. Hmm…not always. The catalogues come in many and varied non-standard formats and even deciding something as simple as what the actual title of a document should be can result in considerable debate. 

But the real challenge that makes this project so much more satisfying for us, and takes it beyond a simple cataloguing exercise, is gleaning additional information from the catalogues themselves or from other sources, such as the internet, electronic databases and books, that will be of potential interest to researchers across a range of disciplines. We started on this project in late September 2023 and have now catalogued well over 450 individual items. We cut our teeth, so to speak, on the catalogues from North America and have now progressed to working our way through the Scottish collection.  

Though we are in the early days of the project, we already have great satisfaction in seeing our completed records on screen with their expanded information content, including many of the intriguing snippets that we have already found relating to the businesses, the personalities involved, the plants listed and the catalogues themselves.  

All nursery catalogue records, including our more detailed records, can be accessed via this link to the RBGE Library catalogue.