Bedgebury Florilegium

Authors: Christina Harrison and Dan Luscombe, 104 pages, 25 illustrations, 210 x 150 mm. Hardback, ISBN 9781842468418, Kew Publishing, 2025.

Founded in 1925, Bedgebury National Pinetum was established through a pioneering partnership with the Forestry Commission and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In celebration of its centenary, this book features 20 stunning botanical paintings by the Bedgebury National Pinetum Florilegium Society, showcasing the beauty and scope of the trees in the collection.

Following the First World War, Kew conifer expert William Dallimore noticed that years of increasing industrial pollution in London was found to be adversely impacting the growth of the trees and went in search of a better environment to house Kew’s conifer collection. With varied topography and a mixture of soil types, Bedgebury proved to be ideal, and the first planting of trees grown at Kew took place there in 1925. Today Bedgebury is home to nearly 12,000 tree specimens and is a centre for conifer science and conservation.

At the heart of the book are the botanical paintings by the Bedgebury National Pinetum Florilegium Society. Founded in 2008, this group of botanical artists are dedicated to documenting the Pinetum’s remarkable plant collection through scientifically accurate and artistically stunning illustrations.

An introduction by Bedgebury Collections Manager Dan Luscombe provides an overview of the Pinetum today, and Christina Harrison’s text offers a charming history of Dallimore and Bedgebury. With a foreword by Simon Toomer, Kew’s Curator of Living Collections.

Christina Harrison (Hourigan) is an author and garden historian. She is currently completing an AHRC techne-funded PhD with Royal Holloway, University of London and the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew researching the cultural history of Kew’s arboretum and its tree collections. Prior to this she worked at Kew for 21 years in interpretation and publishing. She is the author of Kew’s Big Trees (Kew Publishing, 2019) and The Botanical Adventures of Joseph Banks (Kew Publishing, 2020), and co-author of Remarkable Trees (Thames & Hudson and Kew, 2nd edition 2024), Treasured Trees (Kew Publishing, 2025) and Bizarre Botany (Kew Publishing, 2016), and the forthcoming Among the Giants: a year at the Kew Arboretum (Octopus and Kew, 2025).

Dan Luscombe is Collections Manager at Bedgebury National Pinetum, where he has worked for 25 years. He has a National Trust Horticulture Apprenticeship and HND in Horticulture. Dan’s passion for trees has taken him around the world, working with partners to protect and conserve rare and endangered species.