The Flower Garden Display'd is a pictorial calendar dating from 1732 of the blossoming flowers for each month of the year.
The title page reads:
'The Flower Garden Display'd, in above four hundred curious representations of the most beautiful flowers; regularly disposed in the respective months of their blossom, curiously engraved on copper-plates from the designs of Mr. Furber and Others, and coloured to the life.
With the description and history of each plant and the method of their culture; whether in stoves, green-houses, hot-beds, glass-cases, open borders or against walls.
Very useful not only for the curious in gardening, but the prints likewise for painters, carvers, Japaners, & c. also for the ladies as patterns for working, and painting in watercolours; or furniture for the closet.'
The introduction states:
"It may be proper to acquaint the reader with the reasons which induce us to publish the following collection.
First - it will be a means of informing the public of the great variety of flowers, in all their stations, at every season of the year. It may be thought perhaps the Winter months are void of the delights expected in a flower garden; but the mistake will soon be discovered by any curious observer, when he shall find, that there are at least two and thirty flowers of different kinds then in their splendour.
Secondly - as the first impression of the monthly flower-pieces have been so well received by the public, we thought a particular description of the flowers and the nature of their culture, which could not be expressed in the plates themselves, might hope for the same success, it being an observation made by many persons (and we think with much reason), that to know only the names of the flowers, and to be ignorant of their culture, might occasion a continual expense in procuring, such rarities, which, one day, might live with them, and, for want of this necessary knowledge, might perish the next".
(Unfortunately, the illustration of the flower arrangement for the month of March is missing from the volume.)
The image library for the collections of Edinburgh Libraries and Museums and Galleries