Inspired by his enjoyment of his own botanical garden but primarily by Anna Seward's poem “Verses Written in Dr. Darwin's Botanic Garden” (1778), Darwin decided to compose a poem that would embody Linnaeus's ideas. (Darwin would later include an edited version of Seward's poem in "The Loves of the Plants" without her permission and without acknowledgement. Seward was rankled by this treatment and complained of Darwin's inattention to her authorial rights in her "Memoirs of Erasmus Darwin".) According to Seward, Darwin said that “the Linnean System is unexplored poetic ground, and an happy subject for the muse. It affords fine scope for poetic landscape; it suggests metamorphoses of the Ovidian kind, though reversed.” Darwin may have also thought of "The Love of the Plants" “as a kind of love song” to Elizabeth Pole, a woman with whom he was in love and would eventually marry. Concerned about his scientific reputation and curious to see if there would be an audience for his more demanding poem "The Economy of Vegetation", he published "The Loves of the Plants" anonymously in 1789 (see 1789 in poetry). He was stunned at its success and therefore published both "Loves of the Plants" and "Economy of Vegetation" together as "The Botanic Garden" in 1791. Joseph Johnson, his publisher, eventually bought the copyright for "The Botanic Garden" from him for the staggering sum of £800.