‘Making History’ at the Wellcome Library

This week’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s series Making History, features an exploration of the Victorian ‘fern craze’.

In a sequence recorded in the Wellcome Library, historian Helen Castor and researcher Pia Ostlund, look at this growth in amateur botany in the context of Henry Bradbury: a businessman, who with the aid of the new technique of ‘nature printing’, produced intricate images of ferns many of which illustrate the volume The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland (1857).

This episode of Making History will be available on the BBC website listeners in the UK for the next seven days.

Image: A fern frond, possibly of the male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas). Colour nature print, c. 1860 (Wellcome Library no. 23663i)