Edward Bawden's Kew Gardens

Book excerpt: This book draws on Edward Bawden's delightful illustrations, posters and linocuts of Kew Gardens made over 60 years. It presents a light-hearted social history of Kew, peopled with the many Hanoverian Kings, Queens and Princes who resided there, as well as courtiers such as the 3rd Earl of Bute, Joseph Banks Fulke Greville and their proteges including William Chambers, William Aiton, Fanny Burney and Sir William Hooker. Alongside Bawden's posters and linocuts, the book is illustrated with the contemporary caricatures of Thomas Rowlandson, George Cruikshank and James Gillray as well as botanical illustrations by Franz Bauer, Evelyn Dunbar and others. The book also reproduces in full Bawden's previously unpublished manuscript guide to Kew Gardens, drawn by the artist when he was just 19, and the redrawn illustrations and maps in Robert Herring's 1930 book Adam and Evelyn at Kew.