Gardeners Book With 152 Original Plates From Gerards ‘The Herball’ or ‘Generall Historie of Plantes’

~ Gardeners Book With 152 Original Plates From Gerards ‘The Herball’ or ‘Generall Historie of Plantes’ ~

An antique hand-made gardeners reference book containing plates From Gerards ‘The Herball’ or ‘Generall Historie of Plantes’ (first published in 1657, reprinted in 1633 and 1636).

The book contains 152 original plates, each with a single image of a plant.

The plates have been cut-down to one image per page, as the original publication would have featured 4 images per page.

The book also contains a large quantity of hand written text pertaining to the plants in the images.

The first third of the book contains the plates, the second third the hand-written notes while the last third is left blank except for the last 20 or so pages in which is a hand written index.

 The front page has a plate from Jean Bodins ‘The Six Books of the Commonwealth’.

The book is bound in hard brown leather.

~ Dimensions ~

The book measures 13cm (5 inches) by 19cm (7 ½ inches) with a depth of 7cm (2 ¾ inches).

It weighs 2.02 Kg

~ Condition ~

The book has been well used and has suffered from damp so many of the plates have spotting or some discolouration.

The cover of the spine is rather worn though the spine is intact and there are no loose pages.

~ John Gerard ~

Trained as a Barber-surgeon, John Gerard (1545-1612) divided his time working as superintendent of the gardens of William Cecil, Lord Burghley (1521-98), as curator of the Physic Garden at the College of Physicians as well as maintaining his own private garden in which he "grew all manner of strange trees, herbes, rootes, plants, flowers and other such rare things" including the first potato grown in England.

His Herball, the most famous of all English herbals, was first published in 1597 and reprinted in 1633 and 1636. It was an instant success and remained influential until the eighteenth century.