author
Samuel Felton
Best known for an unusual early-19th-century book on garden writing, this little-known author brought together literary history, biography, and a love of cultivated landscapes. His work offers a curious window into how gardening was remembered through the writers who shaped it.
1 Audiobook
About the author
Samuel Felton is a scarce and somewhat elusive figure in the historical record, but he is known as the author of On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, first published in 1828 and expanded in a second edition in 1830. The book gathers biographical notices of earlier English writers on gardening while also tracing the likenesses and portraits associated with them.
That makes Felton interesting not only as a writer about gardens, but as a literary antiquarian. Instead of writing a practical gardening manual, he turned to the people behind the books, linking horticultural history with biography, bibliography, and visual culture.
Because so little reliable biographical information about Felton himself is easy to confirm, the surviving work matters all the more. It remains a distinctive example of how 19th-century readers preserved the memory of authors whose ideas shaped the English gardening tradition.