World - Nonindigenous - Lowe's - Ferns

Edward Joseph Lowe’s Fern Publications — Antique Botanical Prints

Edward Joseph Lowe (1825-1900) was one of the most prolific botanical authors of the Victorian era, whose publications on ferns and ornamental foliage plants produced some of the most beautiful and widely collected botanical illustrations of the 19th century. His works — particularly Ferns British and Exotic (1856-60) and Beautiful Leaved Plants (1861) — combined scientific botanical observation with hand-coloured illustrations of exceptional quality that captured the extraordinary variety and visual appeal of fern fronds and ornamental foliage in terms that made these publications immediate successes with the Victorian reading public.

Lowe’s botanical publications appeared at the height of the Victorian fern craze — the pteridomania that swept Britain from the 1840s onwards and made the collection, cultivation and illustration of ferns one of the defining obsessions of Victorian natural history enthusiasm. The combination of scientific accessibility, practical cultivation guidance and illustrations of genuine artistic quality that characterised Lowe’s publications made them ideal companions to the growing fern collections of Victorian households, and the popularity of his works ensured their widespread availability to the middle-class readership that constituted the primary market for illustrated natural history publishing in the mid-Victorian period.

Ferns British and Exotic covered the full range of fern species available to British growers — both the native British ferns that could be collected in field and woodland and the exotic tropical and subtropical species that could be cultivated in the Wardian cases and ferneries that were fashionable accessories in prosperous Victorian homes. The hand-coloured lithographic plates depicted each species with the botanical accuracy required for identification alongside the decorative quality that made them desirable as illustrated objects in their own right.

Beautiful Leaved Plants extended Lowe’s illustrated coverage to ornamental foliage plants more broadly, documenting the caladiums, begonias, marantas and other tropical foliage plants that shared with ferns the Victorian enthusiasm for dramatic leaf form and colour. The plates from this publication — depicting the extraordinary variety of leaf shapes, textures and colours available to Victorian plant collectors — are among the most visually striking botanical illustrations of the period.

Antique prints from Lowe’s fern publications are collected for their exceptional decorative quality, their connection to the Victorian fern craze and its associated culture, and their importance as botanical documents of the extraordinary diversity of fern and foliage species available to 19th-century collectors.