The New York Botanical Garden is an undisputed national treasure, attracting nearly one million garden lovers a year who travel to the Bronx to marvel at its 250 flowered and forested acres. But this paradise is also home to a nonpareil scholarly repository, an Aladdin’s cave of wonders including antique herbarium books to meltingly beautiful flower portraits by French artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté to raucously colorful 19th-century American seed catalogues.

In Flora Illustrata: Great Works from the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden (Yale University Press; $50), published to mark the garden’s 125th anniversary, editors Susan M. Fraser and Vanessa Bezemer Sellers sift the library’s astounding resources to illustrate this archival breadth as well as to celebrate the keen collective eye that has kept the library at the forefront of horticultural scholarship since it was established in the 1890s.

To see some of the library’s rare, provocative, and often humorous holdings, click here.

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