RUSTIC ADORNMENTS FOR HOMES OF TASTE, Shirley Hibberd 1870 Gardening 230+ Plates

  RUSTIC ADORNMENTS FOR HOMES OF TASTE, by Shirley Hibberd, 1870 —Victorian Gardening and Home Decoration, SCARCE — 9 Colored Plates + 230 Engravings

 Publisher: Groombridge & Sons, London (1870)

Very rare edition of "Rustic Adornment for Homes of Taste" by Shirley Hibberd from 1870. "With 9 coloured plates and 230 wood engravings." Beautiful dark green boards with gilt decorations and writing; designed gilt boards and engravings, 400 pages with Index, and gilt pages. The boards and binding are solid and tight save for minor shelf-wear and a paste-down (from the Cleveland Garden Center) on the inside front and back boards. The pages and illustrations are crisp and clean save for previous owner's inscription on first blank page and printed paper clip imprint on page 2. All illustrations are crisp and clean and retain the original tissue papers. Each page bordered with entwined ivy leaf design. A very rare and highly decorated guide of home and garden design, decoration and improvement by one the most noted English design authorities of the 19th century. Please see below for more information on the gorgeous RUSTIC ADORNMENTS and its noted author!

Description and Biography

  Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste by Shirley Hibberd is often seen as the epitome of encyclopedic books on the Victorian town garden. The contents cover, in the indoor garden, the aquarium, fern case, balcony and window garden, floral ornaments, the 'miniature hothouse’, and the aviary with exotic birds. For outdoors, Hibberd gives details of design and layout for the conservatory, apiary, pleasure and flower garden, the rockery and 'wilderness’, and garden ornaments and constructions (the summer-house as temple, Moorish pavilion, thatched cottage or creeper-covered bower). Shirley James Hibberd (1825-90) was one of the most energetic and prolific of Victorian gardening writers with a broad range of interests; he was a vegetarian, and passionate grower of flowers, fruit and vegetables, so much so that he was continually moving further out of London in order to have space to research and experiment; he is also considered one of the most acutely observant social historians of his time.

His books stand out particularly for the excellence of their production (possibly because he was apprenticed to a bookseller in his youth), the present volume with his publication, 'The Ivy’, being the finest. This edition contains splendid illustrations of Hibberd’s own fern house at Stoke Newington (p217), his mixed border with bulbs and evergreens illustrating the 'plunging system’ and the huge 'geranium pyramid’ in the flower garden.