John Gerard
1542-1612
English Botanist
John Gerard was one of the most important English botanists. He is known primarily for his Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (1597), a book that combined medical knowledge of plants with poetic prose, personal observations, and elaborate illustrations. This book is significant for its content, but is also important because, due to its popularity, it demonstrates the extent to which publishing transformed Elizabethan English society.
John Gerard's botanical texts remain among the most significant and useful written in the English language. Gerard was born in Nantwick in 1545 and was trained as a barber-surgeon. While he never attended university, he was apprenticed to Alexander Mason, a London barber-surgeon with a large practice, from 1561-1568. From 1568 until some time in the 1570s Gerard was the surgeon of a merchant ship. It appears likely that he sailed on a ship of the Merchant Adventurers. The only details known of these voyages are those that Gerard himself recorded. He indicated travel to Moscow, Estonia, Poland, and throughout Scandinavia. These travels were significant in stimulating his interest in the collection of rare and unusual plants.
By 1577 he was married and had established a surgical practice in London. Around this time Gerard was appointed superintendent of the London and Hertfordshire gardens of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Burghley was one of the most influential aristocrats in the court of Queen Elizabeth and helped Gerard through the course of his life. In fact, Gerard dedicated his first book, his catalogue, and the Herball to Burghley.
At this time it was fashionable for the aristocracy to maintain elaborate gardens filled with exotic plants, and to amass extensive collections of herbals in their libraries. As a norm these large, intensively illustrated volumes containedfolklore, commentary gathered from antiquity, medicinal uses of plants, and descriptions of the plants themselves. Furthermore, at this point in European history, medicine and herb gardening were intrinsically related. Gerard's status as a surgeon necessitated his botanical knowledge.
Gerard was also responsible for his own garden, located on Fetter Lane, in Holborn, London. This area had, in 1600, long been a site of suburban gardens, and Gerard constantly expanded and enriched his personal plant collection. Indeed, the opening passage of Gerard's First Booke of the Historie of Plants, a catalogue of the plants in Gerard's own garden, depicts the extent of his enthusiasm:
Among the manifold creatures of God (right Honorable, and my singular good Lord) that all have in all ages diversly entertained many excellent wits, and drawne them to the contemplation of the divine wisdome, none have provoked mens studies more, satisfied their desires so much as Plants have done, and that upon just and worthy causes: For if delight may provoke mens labore, what greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, set with Orient pearles, and garnished with great diversitie of rare and costly jewels?
For Gerard, the individual plant specimen invokes the wonder of an entire universe.
Gerard's most famous work, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, was an expanded version of this first book. Published in 1597, it became a landmark in botanical publishing, and is considered one of the monuments of the English language. Indeed, the fame of this book is the result of its felicitous prose and illustration. He used poetic language to vividly describe the natural world. To him, the lowly dandelion is "a floure . . . thick set together, of colour yellow, which is turned into a round downy blowbal that is carried away with the wind." His work appealed to a wide audience, and included information about both the medicinal qualities of plants and their decorative value. Because of the success of this book, he became the surgeon and herbalist of King James I and was granted a lease to a garden which adjoined the royally-owned Somerset House.
Though the Herball contains many errors in its identification of specimens and has been described by some as Dodoens's Herball for an English audience, Gerard's work dominated its time and is still the best known and most frequently quoted English herbal.
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