The Grolier Club is in bloom with the public exhibition Gardening by the Book: Celebrating 100 Years of the Garden Club of America, on view through July 27, 2013. The show salutes the Garden Club of America which, since its founding in 1913, has maintained for its members a significant library of important garden books. To mark its anniversary, this little-known but remarkable collection of treasures illustrates the activities of the premier American gardening association over the course of a century.  Rich in 400 years of botanical and gardening literature, the exhibition reflects the GCA's major holdings, showcasing 125 rare works selected by curator Arete Warren, author, lecturer, Garden Club of America Library Chairman, and former Chairman of the Preservation League of New York State. 

Included in the exhibition are richly illustrated color plate flower and natural history books, treatises on garden design and landscape architecture, botanical manuals, and early photographic works on gardening.  Nineteenth-century horticultural journals are also on view along with horticultural dictionaries, works on the art of Japanese flower arranging, and fascinating early studies on indigenous flowers of the New World, from Hawaii to Colorado.  The twentieth century is represented by letters and manuscripts from Gertrude Jekyll, first editions of Rachel Carson’s books, including Silent Spring, and early 20th century garden books by GCA member authors.  

Of particular importance are Mark Catesby’s The Natural History of Carolinas, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1771) and Robert Thornton's sumptuously illustrated Temple of Flora (1799-1807), both in their original contemporary bindings.  Mark Catesby was an Englishman whose expeditions to the New World in 1712 and 1722 were to search after 'Plants and other Productions of Nature.'  All illustrations of the hundreds of plates of plants (except two by Georg Dionysius Ehret) were drawn by him and many were hand-painted by him as well.  Robert Thornton's Temple of Flora is "one of the most dramatic and eccentric books.  It merged an explication of Linneaeus's botanical system with a Romantic sensibility for the beauty and mystery of plants…the illustrations are among the most technically complex and aesthetically evocative," notes Leslie Overstreet in her catalogue essay.

The 17th century was the age of exploration and the plant hunters' bounty from Asia and the Americas filled the nurseries of the rich and famous.  Two of the oldest books on view are the early 17th century “Johnson” Herball by John Gerarde and the 1612 hand-colored Florilegium Amplissumum et Selectissimum by Emmanuel Sweert, a Dutch painter and nurseryman.  It was not only one of the earliest comprehensive bulb and flower catalogues, but also a catalyst of the "Tulipomania" craze in Europe.  

The fascination with the amaryllis reached its apogee with the 1831-1834 publication A Selection of Hexandrian Plants Belonging to the Natural Orders Amaryllidoe by Priscilla Susan Falkner Bury, a talented, self-taught artist whose drawings are simple, modern, and varied in terms of how each plant is illustrated and with colors that are fresh and arresting. The book was dedicated to Princess Victoria and depicted 57 plants.  

Accompanying the exhibition is a 256-page catalogue fully illustrated in color, with an introduction by Ms. Warren and essays by  Denise Otis, author, garden writer and former House & Garden editor and Ms. Overstreet, curator of Natural History Rare Books in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of Natural History at the Smithsonian Libraries.