A few hundred originals of his water colour designs make up the Kilburn Album, housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

[2] He was the son of a Dublin architect, Samuel Kilburn (d.1770), and was an apprentice to a calico printer, but spent his spare time engraving and sketching.

Within a short while his skills were being used in the Flora Londinensis, for which he provided life-sized preparatory watercolours and thirty-one signed etchings.

An engraved, illustrated trade card for the gardener Thomas Greening in the British Museum, London, further attests to Kilburn's activity in this medium.

Consequently, the House of Commons proposed a Bill to control the plagiarism, a step meeting furious objections from Carlisle, Aberdeen, Manchester and Lancashire, who felt that their trade would collapse.