Hill’s British Herbal grew out of his earlier work, The Useful Family Herbal (1754), which gave instructions for gathering and preserving roots, flowers and herbs, recipes of medicines and other useful household applications of herbal lore. Hill’s British Herbal provided an authoritative work for the amateur plant lover with an interest in plants for both medical and ornamental purposes, but with little technical knowledge. He continued to use the older names and taxonomies, rather than the new methods of categorising pioneered by Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who laid the foundation for modern plant description (a frequent comment in the work is ‘Linnaeus places this …’, usually followed by Hill’s own, different, opinion). Linnaeus’s colleague Peter Collinson wrote to him in May 1756: ‘Dr. Hill is publishing a history of plants, of which I send you a specimen. As he proceeds through the genuses, he criticizes your method, but not like the foul-mouthed Germans. He treats you like an Englishman, with decency and good manners.’ Hill had evidently some sympathy with Linnaeus’s views. In his earlier work, A General Natural History, or New and Accurate descriptions of the Animals, Vegetables and Minerals of the Different Parts of the World (1748–52), his volume on plants was of particular importance since it introduced the British public to the Linnaean system of plant classification two years before Linnaeus published his own Species Plantarum.

Text adapted from The First Georgians; Art and Monarchy 1714 - 1760, London, 2014