This compact catalog listed (but did not illustrate) medicinal plants of the Chelsea Physic Garden, established by the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries in 1673. Rand was an apothecary and Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

From 1673 the Company leased land in Chelsea for the Physic Garden, or hortus medicus. After Sir Hans Sloane purchased the manor of Chelsea, he deed the site in perpetuity to the Company, requiring that the Garden supply the Royal Society, of which he was a principal, with fifty good herbarium samples per year, up to a total of 2000 plants.

In order to extricate herself and her husband from debt, Elizabeth Blackwell drew, engraved/etched, and hand-colored all the 500 plates comprising this work. Even the text (by her husband?) was engraved. In this undertaking Elizabeth Blackwell received much encouragement from both the Royal College of Physicians and the Company of Apothecaries, and many of the drawings were based on specimens in the Chelsea Physic Garden, near her home. The work was dedicated to Isaac Rand, whose index to the plants of the Chelsea garden is also exhibited in this section.

A later and smaller edition of Blackwell's herbal. Other works based in part on the Chelsea Physic Garden included Trew's Plantae selectae quarum imagines ad exemplaria naturalia Londini, in hortis curiosorum nutrita (1750-1773) and Philip Miller's Figures of the most beautiful, useful, and uncommon plants (exhibited in the section called "Enter the Public".)