Bacon’s classic essay Of Gardens captures a leisured appreciation that is in contrast with our streamlined days. Perhaps it was partly that like some genius of the lamp he had only to command, and his cool alleyways and trimmed hedges would be planted and tended for him. One likes to feel akin to him when he suggests the planting of water-mint, thyme and burnet in paths.

In Elizabethan and Stuart days, knot-gardens, laid out with a clipped pattern, were favourite garden features. Savory, santolina, lavender and marjoram were amongst the plants used; and living sundials were also fashionable during the period.

During the mid-sixteenth century came a landmark in the literary world, for Turner, known as the father of English botany, wrote his herbal. It is pleasant to learn that at Cambridge he was a friend as well as pupil of Ridley, the famous martyred Bishop of London. Turner was at one time Dean of Wells, but on the accession of Mary he had to take refuge on the Continent, and from Cologne published the second part of his Herbal, having written the first part in England. He seems to have been equally famous for his tremendous contribution to the study of plants and their uses, and, at the time, for his Protestant views and somewhat unorthodox behaviour.

Herbal BeautyTurner’s descriptions of plants are careful and detailed. I like the one about Cornflowers. `. . . Blewbottel groweth in ye come, it hath a stalke full of corners, a narrow and long leefe. In the top of the stalke is a knoppy head whereupon growe bleweflowers about midsummer.’ Reinstated later at Wells.

Turner eventually retired and had a physic-garden in London.

Gerard, a contemporary of Turner’s, had a wonderful garden in Fetter Lane, in the City, a nostalgic fact that makes one yearn for a back-glimpse of those days. A passionate urge comes over me to see London as it was when Gerard gathered mallow, shepherd’s purse, woodruff, bugle and clary in and around Gray’s Inn Lane. And I long for the privilege of searching for the pimpinell rose (or burnet rose) ‘in a pasture as you goe from a village hard by London called Knights brige unto Fulham, a Village thereby’, or finding `Osmund the Water-Man’, a Hampstead pond fern.

It appears that Gerard’s endearing Herbal, published in 1597, owes much, unacknowledged, to an English translation of Doedens’ Pemptades. Gerard’s Herbal has, however, a delightful stamp about it, and it was popular because of its refreshingly gifted evocation of herbs and flowers. There they are, lovingly observed and described; dew-fresh and of interest to us because Gerard himself cared so much for them. His writing bridges the centuries for us.

I like his deprecating description of the admittedly sombre flowers of deadly nightshade, which he calls ’sleepy nightshade’, a more tactful euphemism-`small hollow floures bel-fashion, of an overworn purple colour’; followed by ‘berries green at first, but when they be ripe, of the colour of black jet or burnished home, soft, and full of purple juice; among which juice lie the seeds . .

It is suggested that since Shakespeare lived for a time close by, he was almost certain, being a famous literary man, to have seen and enjoyed Gerard’s garden.

During Elizabethan and Stuart days, gallant adventurers sailed to the New World, and sent back specimens and seeds of exciting botanical finds that they made. The introduction of tobacco and the potato are classic stories; it seems, too, that the American sassafras was introduced for its medicinal value, being used in Seville against the pestilence.

Parkinson is generally considered to be the last of the great writers of herbals. His great book Paradisi in Sole reveals a riot of captivating names, of enchanted blossoms, striped, enamelled, jewel-like in their profusion of beauty, infectious in the enthusiasm one catches even from quotations of his pages.

It appears that clove gillyflowers are carnations (spelt with gay abandon, also, gillow flower, gilliflower, or gillofloures, in collaboration with Gerard) ; yellow stock-gillofloures are wallflowers; and stocke gillo-floures are, just stocks. It is not perhaps surprising that the heady comradeship of such exquisite scents, spicy, provocative and alluring, should have linked our garden friends into a fraternity of gillyflowers.

If Gerard kindles my imagination of London as it was, Parkinson stirs into a kaleidoscopic whirl of canterbury bells and sweet williams, of paeonies, sea-holly and gentians; of special tulips, from Candie and Armenia, and others named Fool’s Coat and Cloth of Silver; of rosemary, too, and lavender, tarragon, liquorice, patience, angelica and many other herbs. The list is humbling in its prodigality and in the mental delineation he can achieve of the treasures he grows in Long Acre.

Parkinson’s great herbal, Theatrum Botanicum, was completed in 164o, when he was 73. It did not appear to have the same drawing-power as Gerard’s Herbal, although it was the author’s great life-work. Still, in his time, much folk-lore was included with serious remarks on the medicinal values of herbs.

Culpeper’s name is well known in connection with his Herbal, dated in 1652. Culpeper stressed his belief in the astrological significance of herbs, which seems curious to us. He was apprenticed at first to an apothecary, then decided to practise on his own, in Spitalfields, in the dual role of herbalist and astrologer, drawing on himself the wrath of the College of Physicians by issuing his Physical Directory, a translation of the London Dispensatory.

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