In 1621, a botanic garden was established in Oxford to provide support for the teaching of medicine at the university. It was founded following a £5,250 grant from the Earl of Danby to lease a patch of marshy land from the grounds of Magdalen College and by 1636, the garden was ready for planting, with John Tradescant the elder appointed its first gardener. Tradescant appears not to have had much influence on the gardens and it was not until the appointment of Jacob Bobart the elder (c. 1599-1680) in 1642 that the gardens began to be developed for their intended use. Bobart worked with his son, Jacob Bobart the younger, in laying out the gardens in a formal style, where the names of plants could be prominently displayed. The Bobarts also compiled an enormous herbarium containing dried specimens of 2,800 plants from the garden and the surrounding countryside.

On a smaller scale, Jacob Bobart the elder also published lists of the plants in the garden. The first catalogue, anonymously printed in 1648, contained 1,600 plants. It was followed by this edition a decade later, edited by Bobart's fellow botanists Philip Stephens and William Browne.

This copy has been interleaved, likely by the botanist William Forsyth (1772-1835) so that copious notes and botanical references could be added to the text. An extensive description of the book was also written by Forsyth on the flyleaves. It explains the significance of the work, claiming that it was the first such catalogue of plants published in England to include page references to the works of others, a feature first seen in the Phytobasnos of the Neapolitan botanist Fabio Colonna, first published in 1592 (a 1744 edition is in the Royal Library, RCIN 1057451). This, he claimed, was a feature whose absence from English herbals contemporary to the Catalogus, such as those of John Gerard and Thomas Parkinson, had rendered them little more than curiosities to the nineteenth century botanist.