Background:

These beautiful prints are from British Wild Flowers, a folio illustrated by Mrs. Jane Webb Loudon.  A writer and self-taught artist, Mrs. Loudon developed a love of gardening and flowers from her husband John, a well respected landscape gardener and writer.   The first gardening book she authored was  Instructions in Gardening for Ladies.  In addition to British Wild Flowers, Mrs. Loudon also illustrated guides to annuals, bulbous plants, perennials and greenhouse plants.   An interesting side note is that her very fist written work was The Mummy, written under a man's pen name, "in which I laid the scene in the twenty-second century, and attempted to predict the state of improvement to which this country might possibly arrive".