John Hill's Hortus Kewensis is the first catalogue produced of all the plants being grown in the botanic section of the Dowager Princess of Wales’s gardens at Kew. In the last few years of his life, Frederick, Prince of Wales (father of George III) took an active part in planning and building new features for the gardens attached to the White House at Kew. The plans included an enormous glass-house, where exotic plants could be grown, a project for which his protégé, John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute, was sending requests for plant material to correspondents around the globe in 1750.
After Frederick’s death in 1751, his widow Augusta continued the development of the gardens alongside Bute. The scientific aspect took on greater emphasis with the appointment in 1759 of William Aiton, who established the ‘exotick garden’ in 1760. Augusta commissioned Hill to produce a catalogue of the plants found in the garden and on its publication in 1768, the first edition of the Hortus Kewensis listed some 2,700 plants. By the time this second edition was printed the following year, the number had grown to 3,400.