Jane Webb Loudon

Jane Webb Loudon 1807-1858
Jane Webb was born in Birmingham, England and was orphaned and impoverished at the age of seventeen. She realized it would be necessary to do something to support herself and subsequently wrote a futuristic novel entitled ‘The Mummy’. This caught the attention of John Loudon, a well- respected landscape gardener and writer, whom she married. Jane readily acknowledged that she knew little about gardening before meeting her husband. She began to write popular botanical books that could be easily understood by the public. Between 1840 and 1848 she published five different books based upon her watercolours:
• The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Annuals
• The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Bulbous Plants
• The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Perennials
• The Ladies' Flower Garden of Ornamental Greenhouse Plants
• British Wild Flowers
These all contained beautiful, hand-coloured lithographic plates.

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