Mr Roscoe's Garden

Book excerpt: Mr. Roscoe’s Garden is one of the key components of the Fragrant Liverpool Project, a uniquely international conceptual art project which explores the stories, rites, and exchanges that occur when a flower is cut and placed in the human hand. Exploring the storied history of the Liverpool Botanic Gardens, established by William Roscoe in 1802, this volume discusses everything from its legendary orchid collection to the strange and rare plants that arrived through the city’s ports to the indignity of the Gardens’ closing in the 1980s. No book has ever before explored the Liverpool Botanic Gardens and Jyll Bradley’s painstaking design makes this volume a work of art in itself—perfectly timed to coincide with Gardens’ reopening and the reemergence of the collection at the Chelsea Flower Show for the first time in thirty years.