The Botanist's Companion, or an introduction to the knowledge of practical botany, and the uses of plants : either growing wild in Great Britain. Or cultivated for the purposes of agriculture, medicine, rural economy, or the arts (Two Volumes)

Two volumes. Illustrated with a folding plan in the first volume, 12mo, (measures 180mm x 108mm], the first volume is partly unpaginated, the second volume is (4), 211, (i), slight age-toning and the occasional blemish, the frontispiece is awkwardly folded and along with the title page a bit browned, but otherwise clean and sound internally, half calf and boards, rubbed, lacking most of the spine labels, with the tiny armorial bookplate of William Booth Grey - the son of George Harry Grey (1737, MP for Staffordshire in 1761 and succeeded as the 5th Earl of Stamford 30 May 1768). He is considered to be the artist of two plant collages, in the style of Mary Delany, acquired by the British Museum in 2008. RARE. [William Salisbury, botanical nurseryman, has been erroneously described as a brother of Richard Anthony Salisbury. In the preface he states that from 1791 he was employed by the Board of Agriculture in conducting experiments on the growth of plants ; he may have been previously engaged as a nurseryman. In 1797 he was gardener to J. Symmons, F.R.S., at Paddington House, Paddington, and in the same year entered into partnership with William Curtis at his garden at Queen's Elm, Brompton. After Curtis's death in 1799 he removed the garden to Cadogan Place, Sloane Street, where he held botanical classes. He died in 1823. The site is now the private gardens of Cadogan Place.].…