On the title page of The Planters, Florists and Gardeners Pocket Dictionary (1774) its author, James Gordon, is described as 'Nurseryman, and Florist, at Fountainbridge, near Edinburgh'. This appears to be almost all that is known about him. He is mentioned in J. C. Loudon's Arboretum et Fruticetum Britanicum (1838) as the proprietor of one of Scotland's first tree nurseries, but is absent from John Harvey's Early Nurserymen (1974) and Early Gardening Catalogues (1972) — although he issued A Catalogue of Shrubs and Flowers in 1758. He even managed to elude Blanche Henrey in her exhaustive and otherwise authoritative three-volume British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800 (1975). Sometimes "confused with another James Gordon (c. 1708—80), who ran a successful nursery at Mile End in London and about whom quite a lot is known, our man in Fountainbridge seems to have given history the slip.
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