politician Thomas Whately, which was translated into German and French the following year. This was a very early example of a book largely devoted to describing a series of individual gardens, a sub-genre that came into its own when good quality colour photography became relatively cheap, in the mid-20th century. Thomas Jefferson had a copy of Whately, and his Garden Notes, recording his garden tour in England, in the company of John Adams, begins:Memorandums made on a tour to some of the gardens in England described by Whateley in his book on gardening. While his descriptions in point of style are models of perfect elegance and classical correctness, they are as remarkeable for their exactness. I always walked over the gardens with his book in my hand, examined with attention the particular spots he described, found them so justly characterised by him as to be easily recognised, and saw with wonder, that his fine imagination had never been able to seduce him from the truth. The first gardening book written by a woman was A curious herbal: containing five hundred cuts, of the most useful plants, which are now used in the practice of physick, by Elizabeth Blackwell. Though she is credited as the sole author, she was an illustrator, and her husband Alexander probably did much of the text, from debtor's prison. The book was successful enough to repay his debts and get him out, but he went to Sweden in 1742, where he was executed in 1747 for a mysterious plot against the crown, of which he was probably innocent. As a herbal, the book marked "the last of a genre", although later editions of the most famous, The English Physitian (1652), by the doctor Nicholas Culpeper later entitled The Complete Herbal or Culpepper's Herbal, continued to be printed for centuries after. Horace Walpole's short Essay on Modern Gardening (1782) was highly polemical, and gave an account of the development of the English landscape style that saw William Kent as its essential creator, and played down Capability Brown and other gardeners of the mid-century. This was very influential but is now rejected by modern garden historians. Humphrey Repton, Brown's successor as the leading English garden designer, published three main books on gardening: Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (1794), Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (1803), and Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape