Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 402.1

PARKINSON, JOHN (1567-1650) Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or, A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers : which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed vp : a kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes & fruites for meate or sauce vsed with vs : and, an orchard of all sorte of fruitbearing trees and shrubbes fit for our land : together with the right orderinge, planting & preseruing of them and their vses & vertues. Printed by Humfrey Lownes and Robert Young 1629 [12], 612, [16] pp., illus., port. 34 cm.

John Parkinson was the last of the great English herbalists and one of the first of the great English botanists. He was apothecary to James I and a founding member of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in December 1617, and was later Royal Botanist to Charles I. His monumental work Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris generally describes the proper cultivation of plants. Blanche Henrey (1975) called the work the "earliest important treatise on horticulture published in England”, while the Hunt catalogue (1991) described it as "a very complete picture of the English garden at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and in such delightful, homely, literary style that gardeners cherish it even to the present day. It describes nearly 1,000 plates, mostly exotics.

See Related Record(s): 402.2

Cited references: Garrison-Morton 1823; Wellcome 4832

John Martin M.D. Endowment