Seed catalogues
Nurseries printed seed lists every spring and autumn for most of the eighty years from 1880. The society holds 214 of these printed issues from 31 nurseries, most of them small family works in market towns. The lists survive in three conditions: flat and clean, folded and worn, or bound into the back of gardening almanacs.
Each issue is photographed page by page, with the cover and the back cover as separate files. A catalogue of 48 pages therefore produces around 50 master files, and the plates in the colour issues are captured twice.
Holdings by decade
| Decade | Issues | Notes on the issues |
|---|---|---|
| 1880s | 27 | Mostly single folded sheets |
| 1890s | 31 | Some with plates |
| 1900s | 38 | Mostly paper covers |
| 1910s | 22 | Wartime issues are thinner |
| 1920s | 19 | Two-colour covers begin |
| 1930s | 35 | Supplements and lists of changes |
| 1940s | 9 | Paper shortages show in the page size |
| 1950s | 33 | Colour plates and larger pages |
Text recognition has not been run on any of them. Every list is indexed by hand, and the index records the nursery, the year, the page count, the plate count and the page numbers the nursery itself used. The nursery lists page shows the issues that have been indexed in full.
Seed lists are a poor match for the herbarium sheets. They were printed to be used in a garden, not kept in a cabinet, so the wear on them tells us more about how they were handled than the printed text does.
