Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER III THE FORMAL GARDEN Continued It has been usual in dealing with gardens to include some account of the numerous Herbals which were published in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Strictly speaking, these lie outside the scope of our subject ; the Herbals are little more than catalogues raisonnees of the various fruits and flowers grown in England at the time, with notes on their medicinal qualities, and instructions as to the proper times and methods of planting. This has nothing to do with garden design. As, however, the distinction between garden design, horticulture, and botany was never very clearly made, we give the dates of the principal Herbals. Mr. Hazlitt gives a complete list of the bibliography of gardening, but, as will appear from the titles of the works there mentioned, for the next fifty years after Lawson's book, nearly all the treatises which are not Herbalsdeal with horticulture. The Great Herbal, from the French, was first published in 1516 ; The Little Herbal, from the Latin, in 1525. Gary's Book of the Properties of Herbs, and Macer's Herbal were published about 1540; Ascham's Little Herbal, 1550 ; Turner's Herbal, 1551 to 1568; Lyte's translation of Dodoens's Herbal, 1578 ; John Gerard's Herbal in 1597; John Parkinson's well-known book, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, The Garden of Pleasure, was published in 1629. His Herbal on Theatre of Plants followed in 1640. Gerard had a famous physic garden in Holborn, near Ely Place, overlooking the Fleet. This was one of the earliest of the botanical gardens which reached such a high pitch of perfection in the latter half of the seventeenth century, as, for instance, the well-knownBotanical Garden at Oxford which was founded and presented to the University by the Earl of Dan...