Abstract
The Oak Spring Garden Library, a legacy of Rachel Lambert Mellon (1910–2014) and now part of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, contains the archive of John Bradby Blake (1745–1773), a young trader who worked for the British East India Company in the late 1760s and early 1770s in Canton (Guangzhou) and Macau. The archive provides an unusually detailed insight into Bradby Blake's life and botanical work, including his attempts to send living plants back to England. The archive also contains almost 200 pieces of exquisitely detailed early British‐Chinese hybrid botanical art, which Bradby Blake prepared with a Chinese artist, Mauk‐Sow‐U. With their emphasis on botanical detail and careful depiction of the detailed structure of flowers, these illustrations are as accurate as any produced at this relatively early date in the post‐Linnaean development of botanical science.
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