Priscilla Susan Falkner, (who in 1830 married Edward Bury, a successful railway engineer) was the talented daughter of a wealthy Liverpool merchant whose estate at ‘Fairfields’ boasted a garden full of exotic blooms. It had originally been planned to publish her watercolours as lithos by Hullmandel, and under the name of her friend, the zoologist William Swainson.
Selection of Hexandrian Plants
An incomplete copy of one of the masterpieces of English botanical illustration of the 19th century, Mrs Edward Berry’s Selection of Hexandrian Plants (1831-34), offered at Christie’s on June 4 & 6 contained only 45 (of 51) of the younger Robert Havell’s partially colour-printed and hand-finished engraved and aquatinted plates, but it brought a bid of £60,000 from the Oppenheimer Gallery.
