Green grained leather Spine and corners with raised and gilt banding , gilt title and leaf emblems on the spine. Green grained cloth boards. ( spines faded to tan) Dimensions are for one volume.

F.B.A. provides an in-depth photographic presentation of this item to stimulate your feel and touch. More traditional book descriptions are immediately available.

NEW EDITION

According to Edward Step, who revised the volume: “All the coloured plates have been specially compared for this edition with the carefully hand-coloured originals; and the colour printing has been thereby improved.” Indeed, the coloured plates are bright with crisp edges to the flowers and leaves and with vivid coloration. This copy is also beautifully bound

Anne Pratt (5 December 1806 – 1893) was a botanical and ornithological illustrator and author from Strood, Kent. Anne was the second of three daughters of Robert Pratt (1777–1819), a grocer, and Sara Bundock (1780–1845). Anne Pratt was one of the best known English botanical illustrators of the Victorian age.  As a consequence of her poor health and an impaired knee, during her childhood, she was excluded from sports, and was encouraged to occupy herself by drawing. Pratt was educated at Eastgate House, Rochester, and introduced to botany by Dr. Dods, a family friend. She moved to Brixton, London, in 1826, where she developed her career as an illustrator. Pratt settled in Dover in 1849, and in East Grinstead in 1866. On 15th November 1866 at Christchurch, Luton, Kent, she married John Pearless, with whom she subsequently settled at Redhill. Pratt died in Shepherd’s Bush, London.

Pratt composed more than 20 books, which she illustrated with chromolithographs, on which she collaborated with William Dickes, an engraver skilled in the chromolithograph process. Her works were written in an accessible but accurate style that was partly responsible for the popularising of botany in her day. From her first book, Flowers and Their Associations, her works sold well, but she did not ever achieve critical acclaim as a consequence of a bourgeois disdain for the autodidactic woman.

Pratt’s magnum opus is The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns of Great Britain and Their Allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts, and Horsetails, a six-volume project assessing more than 1500 species, with 300 illustrations, that was published over a decade, between 1855 and 1873. This work was long used as a standard reference work: the illustrations of ferns in the final volume continued to be used into the second half of the twentieth century; they appeared, unattributed and in very much reduced size, and in half tone, in the Observer’s Book of [British] Ferns.