gardens in Louis XIV’s France by Perelle and Sylvestre; and Jan Kip and Leonard Knyff’s early-18th-century bird’s-eye views of English country estates. The latter works yield almost the only evidence of the appearance of these geometrical or regular designs before their supplanting by the irregular or “picturesque" taste. Since landscape architecture grew out of other professions – most obviously, those of architecture, botany and horticulture – the collection also includes treatises by great architectural theorists such as Alberti, Palladio, and Serlio as well as works by such distinguished botanists as Clusius and Linnaeus, or Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina. Books on buildings that served as models for garden structures like pavilions and follies and others relating to the design and decoration of fountains, with the hydraulics necessary for their operation, are included, along with books on sculpture and iconography. Many volumes in the library describe great gardens or garden practice, for example Robert Castell's The Villas of the Ancients Illustrated and various editions of Andrew Jackson Downing’s A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. The collection is also rich in works illustrating flowers and plants – early herbals and botanical writings, floras – works on horticulture, and even agriculture as it affects the life of country estates, such as a 1495 edition of Pietro de' Crescenzi’s Il libro della agricultura. The herbals represent early attempts to create a coherent system of plant description and are forerunners of today's science of taxonomy. Two of them, the Herbarius Latinus, printed in Passau in 1486, and the Hortus Sanitatis, printed in Mainz in 1491, are among the earliest printed books with woodcut illustrations. As the science of botany developed, so did the art of plant illustration. Early herbals had simple, not very realistic, woodcut illustrations of plants. By the 17th century new graphic techniques, such as metal plate engraving and etching, permitted highly detailed botanical renderings. These techniques were also used by artists who created the newly popular still lifes of flowers and fruits, and by artisans, such as jewelers, tapestry weavers, and furniture decorators, in pattern books recording their floral designs. The increasing sophistication of techniques of plant illustration in the 18th century culminated in the development of color printing. The library owns copies of works by Redouté, the first artist to exploit fully the potential of color printing of stipple engravings in such renowned books as Les Roses