Unlike larger and more rural estates, its situation in Camberwell con-nected Lettsom visually to the city, where his town house and successful medical practice were located, and thereby the commercial activity as a physician, which had allowed him to purchase and develop his “terrestrial Elysium.” His professional metropolitan career began in 1770 when Lett-som became licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians and began practic-ing in Basinghall Street in the City of London. In this year he also married Anne Miers, a union that brought with it a considerable financial settle-ment.2 The purchase of the estate at Camberwell in 1779 then represented a statement of personal and professional success and a suitable retreat for a late Georgian medico-gentleman (plate 1). This visual relationship to Lon-don also denoted Grove Hill’s links to a world beyond the garden gate, and it is this wider context that will be the focus of this book.Rather than concentrate on an individual garden or a group of gardens affiliated with a single designer, style, or location, this book will place Lettsom’s country estate at the center of a medico-botanic network that was connected by the movement of ideas, people, plants, animals, and objects.3 By repositioning our focus away from a traditional scientific center of cal-culation—such as the Royal Collection at Kew gardens, also on the fringes of London, and which was similarly being developed into an internationally important scientific resource by Joseph Banks, president of the Royal So-ciety and a keen botanist himself—this book will aim to show how less elite gardens developed and owned by medical practitioners and their networks also played a crucial role in the development and exchange of knowledge during the late Georgian period.