BOURNE, Hermon.

Flores Poetici. The Florist's Manual: Designed As An Introduction to

Item #48549

BOURNE, Hermon. Flores Poetici. The Florist's Manual: Designed As An Introduction to Vegetable Physiology and Systematic Botany, for Cultivators of Flowers, With More than Eighty Beautifully Coloured Engravings of Poetic Flowers. Boston & New York: Munroe and Francis & Charles S. Francis, 1833. 288pp. including seventy-three handcolored engravings. Contemporary three quarter morocco and cloth, spine gilt. Boards rubbed, worn at hinges and extremities. Scattered foxing. Very good. A treatise on botany, with interesting early American color plates. In the introduction, Bourne states that his purpose is to provide his readers with a text that includes a discussion of the scientific elements of plant botany that will be accessible to the casual reader. The list that appears under the running title “Index to Colored Flowers” is misleading. Though 124 plants are noted, many in the same class are represented by a single, general illustration. Moreover, the “Index” includes the “interpretation” of each plant according to the language of flowers, though perhaps not the meanings most familiar to us now: Shakespeare’s Ophelia says “And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts” (IV.v.3054) but Bourne claims pansies are for “pleasing remembrance” – which is what Ophelia says about rosemary.
According to the title page, Bourne was editor of the LITERARY MAGAZINE. Otherwise, Bourne has proved difficult to trace; one auction record for the Manual gives his life dates as 1800–1852. An attractive, and rare, American botanical. Not in Bennett or McGrath. OCLC 5226972.

Price: $4,500.00