Charles Jones was an English gardener whose sensitively composed gelatin silver prints of vegetables, fruits and flowers have been widely championed since they were discovered at a London antiques market in 1981. Jones trained as a gardener from an early age. By 1905 his horticultural expertise won him the position of head gardener at Ote Hall in Sussex where he raised a remarkable variety of vegetables and flowers. His passion was also to document in glass plate negatives each of the hundreds of specimens he grew. Jones’ mastery of the gold-toned silver gelatin glass plate negative process, which also relied on the sun for success, went unrecognized during his lifetime. What is clear is that the meticulous attention he devoted to photographing the beauty of his crops and flowering plants at Ote Hall was matched by the care he devoted to their cultivation. Inscriptions on the back of each photograph include the photographer’s initials and a precise record of the particular cultivar, many of which are heirloom varieties appreciating a renaissance today.

Printed from glass plate negatives, Jones’ gold-toned gelatin silver prints are each unique. In their direct, up close representation the images reflect an unusually modern sensibility that contrasts the prevailing approach to botanical subjects by his contemporaries. The glass plates were used for a single print and then relegated to the gardens where they were made useful as cloches for seedlings.

Charles Jones’ vintage photographs are in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, San Francisco, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His work has been the subject of museum exhibitions at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (1988), at Le Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland (1999), and the Chicago Botanical Gardens (1999).