The Botanical Register

Overview

The Botanical Register, later retitled Edwards's Botanical Register, was a British illustrated horticultural magazine published in London from 1815 to 1847. Founded by the botanical artist Sydenham Edwards after his break with Curtis's Botanical Magazine, it issued 33 volumes containing some 2,700 hand-colored engraved plates of exotic plants cultivated in British gardens, with botanical descriptions by John Bellenden Ker Gawler and, from 1829, by the great botanist John Lindley. It stands with Curtis's as one of the two great English botanical plate magazines of the nineteenth century.

Sydenham Edwards and the Break with Curtis's

Sydenham Edwards (c. 1768–1819), a Welsh artist mentored by William Curtis, had been the principal illustrator of Curtis's Botanical Magazine for its first twenty-eight years, from 1787. In 1815, following a dispute with the magazine's editors — Curtis's successors — Edwards left and founded a rival periodical of his own. The Botanical Register reproduced the successful Curtis formula — a hand-colored plate with letterpress description for each plant — but under Edwards's own control, and with an artistic style contemporaries judged freer than the magazine he had left. Edwards's obituary praised him as an accurate and able botanical draughtsman surpassed by few.

The Edwards Years, 1815–1819

Edwards edited the first five volumes of the Register in five years, providing the paintings from which the plates were engraved and hand-colored by assistants. The text was written by John Bellenden Ker Gawler, a botanist and author who gave the magazine scientific standing. The full title — The Botanical Register: consisting of coloured figures of exotic plants cultivated in British gardens, with their history and mode of treatment — announced its dual audience: botanists who needed accurate figures, and gardeners who needed cultivation advice for the exotic plants then flooding into Britain from its expanding trade and empire.

The Ridgway Years, 1820–1828

Edwards died in 1819. Editorial responsibility passed to the magazine's publisher, James Ridgway of London, who issued a further nine volumes between 1820 and 1828 — volumes 6 through 14. Ridgway kept the magazine's format and quality intact through the 1820s, with designs principally by Edwards (from his remaining work), M. Hart and Miss Sarah Drake, the artist who would become the Register's defining illustrator in its final phase.

John Lindley and Edwards's Botanical Register

In 1829 John Lindley — professor of botany, secretary of the Horticultural Society and the leading British botanist of his generation — became editor, and the magazine was retitled Edwards's Botanical Register in its founder's honor. Lindley edited a further nineteen volumes until the magazine's discontinuation in 1847. Under Lindley the Register became scientifically weightier, a vehicle for describing new genera and species reaching Britain. In 1839 he issued an Appendix to the first twenty-three volumes, which included his Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony — a foundational work on the flora of Western Australia, produced from the magazine's platform.

Sarah Drake's Illustrations

The Register's later volumes are inseparable from Sarah Drake, who contributed over one thousand illustrations to the magazine. Drake, who worked closely with Lindley, was among the most productive botanical artists of the nineteenth century; her plates for the Register — precise, luminous and hand-colored — are the visual legacy by which the magazine is chiefly known today. The orchid genus Drakea was named for her.

The Complete Run

The complete Register comprises 33 volumes (1815–1847): volumes 1–14 under the original title, and the new series under Lindley's editorship from 1829. A complete set contains some 2,700 engraved plates — auction records for fine sets describe 2,709 plates, nearly all hand-colored. Bibliographers Nissen and Stafleu catalogue the work among the essential botanical plate books, and complete sets in contemporary bindings command substantial prices at auction.

Place Among Botanical Magazines

The Register was the only serious rival Curtis's Botanical Magazine ever faced, and the rivalry was personal — founded by Curtis's own artist in protest. Where Curtis's survives to this day, the Register closed in 1847, but for thirty-three years the two magazines together documented the transformation of British gardens by the plant hunters, and set the standard for botanical illustration as both science and art.

Preservation and Access

The complete run is digitized and freely accessible through the Biodiversity Heritage Library and Botanicus, making every plate available to researchers and artists worldwide. Individual plates circulate in the antique print market, but the digital archive has restored the Register as a working botanical reference, consulted for the original published figures of thousands of cultivated plants.

The Register's production system explains its quality. Each monthly part offered hand-colored engraved plates after paintings by its artists — Edwards himself, then M. Hart and Sarah Drake — with letterpress by Ker Gawler for the first fourteen volumes and by Lindley thereafter: a division of labor among artist, engraver, colorist and botanist that made the magazine a small factory of botanical knowledge. The full publishing record runs to 33 volumes and, by the count of a complete set sold at Bonhams, some 2,709 plates, nearly all hand-colored — figures that convey what a subscription to the Register accumulated on a library's shelves. Lindley's 1839 Appendix, with the Sketch of the Vegetation of the Swan River Colony, shows the magazine functioning as a scientific platform in its own right, originating a foundational flora of Western Australia. The bibliography is correspondingly serious: Nissen and Stafleu catalogue the work, the Biodiversity Heritage Library's digitization has made every plate consultable worldwide, and the print trade continues to disperse individual Drake plates — over a thousand of which she drew for the Register — into collections everywhere.

The Register's rivalry with Curtis's Botanical Magazine is one of publishing history's productive feuds. Edwards had given Curtis's its visual identity for twenty-eight years; his departure in 1815 over an editorial dispute, and his immediate founding of a competing magazine with the same format, split the botanical public between two plate magazines that then coexisted for three decades. Gardeners and botanists subscribed to both; the competition kept standards of illustration high in each. That the Register closed in 1847 while Curtis's continues today should not obscure the Register's distinct contributions — Lindley's Swan River flora, Drake's thousand plates, and a visual record of the exotic plants that transformed British gardens in the age of the plant hunters.

For modern readers the Register is encountered in two forms: the digitized complete run, plate by plate, in the Biodiversity Heritage Library, and the dispersed original — single hand-colored plates, Drake's orchids above all, framed in homes and sold by print dealers who rarely know the magazine they were cut from. The directory record restores the whole: 33 volumes, three editorial regimes, one founding quarrel, and the fullest visual census ever made of the plants that filled Britain's gardens between Waterloo and the Great Exhibition.

Ridgway's role as publisher-editor through the 1820s kept the enterprise coherent between its two famous editors — the unglamorous middle on which the magazine's continuity, and its complete sets' very existence, depend. Publishing history rarely credits the publisher; the Register's 33 volumes are his monument as much as Edwards's or Lindley's.

Directory Facts

The Botanical Register (from 1829, Edwards's Botanical Register) was an illustrated horticultural magazine published by James Ridgway in London, England, United Kingdom, from 1815 to 1847, in 33 volumes. The magazine is defunct.