REFERENCE BOOKS ON ENGLISH GARDENING LITERATURE. 121 



Reid, Justice, Abercrombie, and Nicol worthily uphold the 

 Scottish garden literature of their day. 



1763. Thomas Martyn, F.R.S., Professor of Botany at Cam- 

 bridge, translated the " Georgics " of Virgil, with notes, and 

 edited the ninth and best edition of Miller's great " Gardener's 

 Dictionary." 



1767. John Abercrombie, born in Edinburgh in 1726, where 

 his father had an extensive market garden, and he saw the 

 battle of Preston Pans from his father's garden walls. He early 

 came to London, and was gardener to several gentlemen, but 

 eventually set up as a market gardener between Mile End and 

 Hackney, afterwards removing to Newington and Tottenham 

 Court, where he had a seedsman's and florist's business. In 

 1778 he wrote his " Every Man his own Gardener," and paid 

 Thomas Mawe, the Duke of Leeds' gardener, twenty pounds to 

 allow his name on the title page. He afterwards became more 

 confident of his powers, and published his " Gardener's Pocket 

 Journal or Daily Assistant," 1791, which ran through many 

 editions, and for many years 2,000 copies were annually sold. 

 He wrote many other works, and was a very practical believer in 

 tea and tobacco, of both of which he consumed enormous 

 quantities. There is a tradition that when he went to see 

 Thomas Mawe he found him so bepowdered and dressed that 

 he mistook him for his master, the Duke of Leeds. Abercrombie 

 is said to have been induced to write by Mr. Davis, a London 

 bookseller, and the celebrated Dr. Oliver Goldsmith, the latter 

 promising to revise and correct his original MSS., which of 

 course he did not perform. 



1777. Conrad Loddiges. The Loddiges had a celebrated 

 nursery of exotics at Hackney during the latter end of the 

 eighteenth and beginning of the present century, and were the 

 first trade cultivators of Orchids. Their serial work with plain 

 and coloured plates, " The Botanical Cabinet," extended to twenty 

 volumes. It was established in 1818. 



1789. William Curtis, to whom we are indebted for the 

 "Flora Londinensis" and the still existent and flourishing 

 " Botanical Magazine," was born at Alton, in Hampshire, in 

 1746. Curtis's father was a tanner, and the son was apprenticed 

 to his grandfather, who was an apothecary in the same place. 

 Living near to the old Crown Inn at Alton young Curtis became 



