The series starts with the reproduction of the first editorial from The Gardeners’ Chronicle, 2 January 1841, setting out the principal subjects the journal’s founders – the landscape gardener Joseph Paxton, botanist John Lindley, patron and Great Exhibition promoter Charles Wentworth Dilke and printer William Bradbury – intended to embrace.
They told their readers in that first editorial: “Our great object will be to make our Paper, in the truest sense of the work, the gardener’s friend; collecting what is useful to him, opposing wrong, defending right and maintaining by every proper means the legitimate interests of all branches of knowledge connected with the subjects to which our Journal is devoted.”
Throughout 2016, the Horticulture Week team will be digging through the archives held at RBG Kew, to bring readers their pick of horticultural kit from the 19th and early 20th centuries, letters to the journal from eminent figures such as Charles Darwin, first hand reports from key moments in horticultural history, and more.
Writing in last week's edition of Horticulture Week, Editor Kate Lowe said: “What Paxton and Lindley might have made of today’s editorial team turning first to Twitter to announce the 175th anniversary of the journal is anyone’s guess.
“But while the world in which horticulture operates today would for the founders be unrecognizable, many of the factors driving the profession remain the same – the thirst for knowledge, an indefatigable drive for technical innovation, an innate understanding of horticulture’s many benefits to society and, underlying it all, an unstoppable passion for plants.”
