Rare Publications

The Rare Publications Collection contains over 5000 volumes, including journals, nursery catalogs and books dating back to the fifteenth century. Included in this special collection is a significant group of herbals, works by and about Linnaeus, trees, gardening, nature printing, and landscape architecture.

This collection includes:

• Herbals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries including the great herbals of Fuchs and Brunfels of Germany, Mattioli of Italy, Dodoens of Holland, and Gerard of England
• Robert Furber's Twelve Months of Flowers published in 1730—this celebrated and beautiful flower catalog presents almost 400 different flowering species, grouped according to the month in which they flower
• Pliny's Natural History published in Parma in 1482
• First edition of Species Plantarum by Linnaeus published in 1753—the starting point for modern botanical nomenclature
• Broadside from William Prince Nursery, Flushing, Long Island, printed in 1771—the first commercial nursery catalog of the Colonies
• Complete collection of Curtis's Botanical Magazine dating from 1793
• Collection of regional historic nursery catalogs such as Vaughan, Buckbee, and Shumway starting in the late 19th century
• Earliest published list of plants in a botanical garden by Girolamo Porro from 1591
• First folio edition of Philip Miller's The Gardeners Dictionary published in 1731
• One of the most important pre-Linnaean works, Hortus Elthamensis by Johann Jakob Dillenius published in 1732