Unearthed: The Power of Gardening is a free display at The Mitchell Library (2 May – 10 August 2025) exploring the transformative, enriching and sometimes radical power of gardening.
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00:00So, my name's Clare. I'm one of the Librarians in Special Collections, which is one of the departments here in the Mitchell Library.
00:06And I have a very special and unique book to show you today.
00:10It's Herbo, which is a book of illustrations of plants.
00:15The first edition was published in 1597, but this edition, the second one, was published in 1633.
00:22It's full of woodcut illustrations of plants from around the world.
00:28And this particular copy of this book is completely unique.
00:33So, it has an embroidered cover.
00:37So, you can see here that it's a vase of flowers with fratellaries and forget-me-nots.
00:45And we know exactly who embroidered that cover because of some of the information inside the book.
00:51It belonged to a woman called Roberta Anderson, and Hart and her sisters lived in a big house in Ayrshire.
00:58They were very well off, but on the census of 1911, they were listed as pony breakers, iron turners, gardeners, etc.
01:10So, you can see that there were women who were really working in their place.
01:15One of the members of the family gave it to a man called James Whitten, who was the Director of Parks for Glasgow.
01:22It then ended up in the Parks Department and then the Mitchell Library in 1960.
01:27So, that's how it got here.
01:28This is the sort of title page and you can see a name here.
01:32Mary Wilson, her book.
01:35And on this page, we have mainly women's names in this book.
01:40So, it's like social history, all of these.
01:42We have Mary Harris, Mary Wilson and B.H. Anderson.
01:47So, that's Bertha, Robertha Anderson.
01:51And she is the lady who embroidered the cover.
01:54It was given to her by her friend, Miss Longfield, who got it from a bookseller.
02:00And when Bertha died, her sister gave it to James Whitten and wrote the date of Bertha's death there.
02:09October 31st, 1918.
02:11So, it was given to James as a sort of remembrance of Bertha.
02:16So, they obviously knew each other.
02:18To have this book, she was a gardener.
02:20It says that in the census.
02:21To have this book, it meant a lot to her.
02:24It would have been very expensive to buy at the time.
02:28And it's full of these kind of woodcuts of plants.
02:37So, this is like, all the additions of Gerard's Herbal look like this inside.
02:42So, it is actually in really good condition as well.
02:45They said that he plagiarised quite a lot of it.
02:50The woodcuts are recycled from another book that was published previously.
02:55That was published previously.
02:56That was published previously.
02:57That was published previously.