The Oxford Botanic Garden is the oldest surviving botanic garden in Britain, occupying the same location in central Oxford since 1621. Designed as a nursery for growing medicinal plants amid the turmoil of the civil war, and nurtured through the restoration of the monarchy, it has, perhaps unsurprisingly, a curious past.

This book tells the story of the garden through accounts of each of its keepers, tracing their work and priorities, from its founding keeper, Jacob Bobart, through to the early nineteenth-century partnership of gardener William Baxter and academic Charles Daubeny, who...