The Florists’ Manual, or, Hints for the Construction of a Gay Flower-Garden; with Directions for Preventing the Depredations of Insects, Observations on the Treatment and Growth of Bulbous Plants, Curious Facts Respecting Their Management, and Direction for the Culture of the Guernsey Lily de Jackson, Maria Elizabeth

London: Henry Colburn, 1827. New [third] edition (adverts, vii, 136). Six colour plates, one folding as frontispiece. Slim octavo, modern brown half cloth and green paper-covered boards with matching endpapers; gilt titles to spine. While Jackson (whose name is sometimes spelt ‘Jacson’-- as in Shteir, ODNB, where her name is given as ‘Maria Elizabetha Jacson’) does not appear on the title page as the author, which simply gives us ‘the authoress’, she is named on the final page of the book. The Manual, Jackson’s most successful book, was preceded by Botanical Dialogues (1797), evidently intended as an introduction to botany suitable for schools, Botanical Lectures (1804), a re-worked version of Dialogues, which had proved ‘too learned for the juvenile market’. Jackson (1754- 1842) began writing in the first place for the best of reasons: she needed the money. Erasmus Darwin commended her first book and praised her for ‘so accurately explaining a difficult science in an easy and familiar manner’. The chief readers of the Florist’s Manual were Jackson’s ‘sister Florists partakers of my pleasures’ and the book sought to ‘enable them more methodically to arrange their flowers, and so to blend their colours, that..they may procure a succession of enamelled borders’ (ODNB). Frontis slightly off-set to title page of an otherwise crisp, clean copy in a bright, modern binding.