Historical information
Digitised volumes of this publication are held at the National Library of Australia (three complete editions and three incomplete editions) and Flinders University - University Central Library (several loose volumes, adding up to the nine, however none bound as a leather edition).
Another related edition exists that comprises approximately 30 illustrated plates without the associated text. Both the University of Western Australia Library and the National Library of Australia hold a copy of this plate-only version.
The State Library of South Australia and the South Australian Museum hold collections of botanical art by Rosa Fiveash, but none that are part of published volumes.
Significance
The collection of volumes of The Forest Flora of South Australia holds historic, scientific (horticultural) and aesthetic significance. The volumes are important in their association with John Ednie Brown (1848-1899), a prominent silviculturist who was highly respected in the international horticultural community. They are also significant in their association with Rosa Fiveash (1854-1938), a prominent botanical artist whose work is held in other public collections. They are of horticultural significance as early documentations of Australian flora and fauna in the late-nineteenth Century, reflecting attempts to understand the native environment and landscape. The volumes hold aesthetic significance for containing particularly beautiful artistic representations of South Australian plant specimens.
They have interpretive potential as objects with aesthetic merit, and also as being representative of early attempts to understand the Australian landscape.
Physical description
This collection of The Forest Flora of South Australia 1882 comprises six volumes in one bound leather edition, including volumes 1, 2, 3, 4 (its front cover is missing), 5 and 6. These six volumes are presented in a green leather bound cover with decorative gold edging and a title plate that reads: THE FOREST FLORA/of/South Australia in gold script on a black background. The cover also has two string fasteners on the right hand side that secure the volumes in place.
Each staple-bound volume features cloth backed pictorial wrappings of approximately 30 pages each, consisting of botanical descriptions and illustrations of plant specimens found in South Australia in the late-nineteenth-century.
