'Dry Gardens': Books and Plants in Hans Sloane's

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As touched upon by Marjorie Swann (Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England) plants provide us with a microcosm of both the general process of collecting and the specific problems facing a literary re-evaluation of Sloane's collection. In order to be preserved and presented, they must be dried and thereby transformed. The form in which they are seen, therefore, is representative rather than direct; the viewer must do some work to extrapolate back to the living plant. In much the same way, Sloane's super-collection must be approached backwards by literary scholars, as we try to work out what might have been. Furthermore, the preservation of these plant specimens in book format (the 'horti sicci'), reinforces the physical 'midway ground' between books and objects that Leah Knight (Of Books and Botany (2009); Reading Green in Early Modern England (2014)) has drawn upon in her discussion of the material early modern book composed of 'leaves' and bound with wood. On a textual level, too, Juliet Fleming has repeatedly come back to the idea of the printed 'flower', a decoration which straddles the roles of text and object.Yet this connection is also a metaphorical one. The early modern tendency to draw upon the language of plants when describing the collation of literature is still evident today - especially the etymological trace of 'anthology' as a collection of flowers, or 'poesies' - a language that gained particular traction throughout the sixteenth century with the practice of the commonplace book, which I suggest acts as a text-prototype of the museum collection. This register has proved so strong that it has pervaded critical writing: in The Renaissance Extended Mind (2015), Miranda Anderson writes that commonplacing provided a way to interrogate the place of the human through 'the tangible timber of textual matter'. Taken together botany, writing, and collecting are repeatedly presented as a framework through which to explore the role of the book.This is the framework through which I approach Sloane's library: through a lens of natural biology, in order to see what results mapping the traces of plant-collection onto book-collection can reveal. Using the idea of anthologising as both a metaphorical theory and physical reality for Sloane as collector, the attention paid to how he thought about plants will provide a way of understanding how different aspects of the collection influenced each other, with wider implications for our understanding of how collection functions as