I’m sure many people might be be put off even opening an old  book with a long Latin name like Paradisi in sole Paradis terrestris – and indeed you might be put off reading this post any further because of that, although I hope not.  Such reluctance for many books with long Latin names is understandable. They are usually  long-winded and  devoid of any illustrations.  But in the case of Paradisi it’s exactly the opposite.

It was a landmark  book which shows  how both  gardening and botany were evolving into a new form of science in the 17thc. And even if you’re not much interested in the history of botanical science,  it’s worth looking at simply for the beautiful high quality illustrations. Obviously originally printed in black and white, owners could easily hand-colour them the images have since become popular as decorative prints.

The plain images in this post all come from Paradisi unless otherwise acknowledged. They are in the public domain and are courtesy of the Wellcome Foundation   The coloured images come from panteek or lassco where you can buy the originals. 

Parkinson  must have been a man with a good sense of humour as well as a deep knowledge of plants and gardening because title  Paradisi is simply a pun  on his own name and translates as ‘Park-in-sun’s earthly paradise.”

Dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I and published in 1629, it marked a real breakthrough in botanical books, with Parkinson trying to include  all known ornamental and culinary plants in his account of an earthly paradise. As he says in the introduction: “God’s purpose was that man should know and understand plants, not just their sense and pleasurable beauty, but also the uses and properties for meat and medicine.”

The alternative title for the book  is  “A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our, English ayre will permitt to be noursed up”. It includes sections on ” a Kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes, & fruites, for meate or sause used with us” and  “an Orchard of all sorte of fruitbearing Trees and shrubbes fit for our Land.” Finally there is advice on  “the right orderinge planting & preserving of them and their uses & vertues.”

It’s a big book, roughly 14 x 9 inches or 36x23cm, not quite as large as a modern folio edition in size but still substantial. It must have taken Parkinson years of observation and writing to compile his  often very detailed notes  and to present them  along the almost modern scientific lines of what we would probably recognise as genuses and species. The text also shows his involvement in a Europe-wide network  of other inquisitive plantsmen and early  botanical scientists.

Of course, none of that is obvious at first and what grabs the attention is the engraving on the title page, which as we’ll see is very different in style to the illustrations of plants within the main part of the book, being much more naive and almost humorous.

It’s worth looking at in detail because there is so much to see and it’s easy to miss things.  It was signed in the bottom righthand corner by Albert Switzer, about whom I can find very little information, although he was probably the son of  Christopher Switzer [1593-1611] a Swiss German who also worked on earlier botanical books including Matthias de l’Obel‘s Stirpium adversaria nova (1571) .

The verbal pun park-in-sun of the title is made visual too because the woodcut centrepiece shows the park -the garden of Eden – set inside the framework of an oval stylised sun with lots of stubby rays.    At the top of the oval is another stylised sun  with its rays surrounded by clouds and with the  four-letter word YHWH or JHVH, the Biblical Hebrew  name of God.

Underneath and forming the background, the park includes a forest with  a single river running through it, rather than all the four rivers mentioned in Genesis. There are several  distinct kinds of trees, including  fruit trees of various kinds and a palm. A tree to one side has a grape vine climbing up its trunk while on the opposite side there another tree supporting a climbing rose.

In the foreground are Eden’s two human inhabitants surrounded by a wide range of plants. Eve is bending over reaching for a tempting strawberry; as you may have read in an earlier post the strawberry had all sorts of symbolic meanings- both religious and secular.  

Adam on the other hand is doing some practical gardening, apparently grafting a scion onto a stock[although without a grafting knife].  As I showed in another earlier post grafting was well understood by the early seventeenth century and it was seen as a highly skilled technique, learned by gentlemen as well as their gardeners. It enabled them to propagate specific kinds of useful plants such as fruit trees, which was important give that food self-sufficiency was the order of the day for most people.

 

Many of the plants around in the garden are easily recognisable, with  a mix of indigenous, new exotics and fictional species. although they are not shown in realistic scale. I’m not going to attempt a comprehensive account of all of them since some seem to be  fairly generic “flowers” but there are several worth specific mention.

Next to Adam is “the Queene of delight and of flowers” a carnation, although this one is as tall as he is, perhaps reflecting Parkinson’s view that “Carnations and Gilloflowers  bee the chiefest flowers of account in all our English Gardens.”  He has a couple of well-illustrated chapters devoted to them because “the number of them is so great.”    He also uses carnation, meaning flesh coloured,  as a description of the colour of other plants particularly for some reason anemones.

On the left  is “the Lillie of Constantinople called likewise in England Martagon of Constantinople” according to Gerard in his Herbal of 1597. Parkinson again devotes an entire chapter to them saying that “All these Lillies have been found in the divers Countries of Germany, as Austria, Hungaria, Pannonia, Stiria, &c. and are all made Denisons in our London Gardens, where they flourish as in their owne naturall places. The last was brought into France from Canada by the French Colonie, and from thence unto us.”

In the centre is a tulip, or “Turkes Cap”. [Tulip means turban] The one shown is flamed probably because it’s suffering from the Tulip breaking virus which was to play an important role in ‘tulipomania’, a little later in the century. The virus is spread by aphids and  causes flower to have broken colour  patterns, often in streaks or “flames”  and because these colour breaks were upredictable affected bulbs were highly prized and commanded huge prices.  Unfortunately  the colour breaks weren’t stable so that the bulb and any off-sets could flower completely differently in subsequent years. The virus also weakened bulb’s vigour so they soon failed to flower successfully . By the 18thc long after Parkinson’s day English florists’ tulips with stable colour breaks were developed [For more on that see the website of the Wakefield and Northern England Tulip Society] Parkinson obviously liked the idea of designing with tulips suggesting planting them so  that they  “may be so matched, one colour answering and setting of another, that the place where they stand may resemble a peece of curious needle-worke, or peece of painting; and I have knowne in a Garden, the Master as much commended for this artificiall forme in placing the colours of Tulipas, as for the goodnesse of his flowers, or any other thing.”

Just behind the tulip is a cyclamen  or “sowebread”  which Parkinson says is “a flower of rare receipt, because it is naturally hard to encrease.” I wonder what he was doing wrong since mine spread like wildfire, into every dry shady corner.

He identifies 10 different types all of which he clearly grew because they and their habits are described in minute detail. These reveal the various origins including the “Sowebread of Antioch” and the “Autumne Sowebread with white flowers” which “is reported to grow in the Kingdome of Naples.”

In the bottom right of the engraving are  some crocus for which he he also uses the term saffron – and of which there are some twenty sorts.  Next to them is a tiny daffodil, although in the text Parkinson mentions about 100 varities with evocative names such as “the great double purple ringed daffodil of Constantinople”, “the white mountain daffodil with ears” & “the great yellow Spanish bastard daffodil”.  Parkinson also grew daffodils from  seeds given to him by his friend Dr Flud who had collected them in the university garden in Pisa.

Both bulb groups have chapters of their own in the main text.

There are exotic introductions in the garden too.  To the left is what at first sight is a cactus of some sorts which Parkinson calls an  “Indian Figge tree”.  He adds that “Our English people in Virginia, and the Bermuda Island, where it groweth plentifully, because of the form of the fruit, which is somewhat like to a Peare, & not being so familiarly acquainted with the growing of Figs, sent it unto us by the name of the prickly Peare, from which name many have supposed it to be a Peare indeede, but were therein deceived.”

Several different sorts of prickly pears exist and he’s very aware that those from the the hottest climes will not overwinter in Britain, although from more temperate zones like Virginia will usually do so   although he is clear that “here they do not grow to tree size” while “the fruit never commeth to perfection.”

 

On the other side of the stream to Eve is an unusual looking tree.  The image is very similar or perhaps even derived from one in Gerard’s Herbal of 1597  where it is described as ‘Adams Apple tree’ .

You might be able to guess what it is from Gerard’s description:  “In the midst of the top among the leaves commeth foorth a soft and fungus stumpe, whereon do grow divers apples in forme like a small Cucumber, and of the same bignes, covered with a thin rinde like that of the Fig, of a yellow colour when they be ripe: the pulpe or substance of the meate, is like that of the Pompion [pumpkin], without either seedes, stones, or kernels, in taste not greatly perceived at the first, but presently after it pleaseth, and intiseth a man to eate liberally thereof, by a secret intising sweetnes which it yeeldeth.”

Gerard himself probably never saw a plant but relies on “mine author” for his description although ”  my selfe have seene the fruit, and cut it in peeces, which was brought me from Alepo in pickle.”   The alternative name used will give the game away to many gardeners: ‘Musa Serapionis’. “This admirable tree groweth in Aegypt, Cyprus and Syria, neere unto… Alepo; and also ….in Canara, Decan, Guzarate, and Bengala, places of the East Indies.  It is of course a banana tree.  The 1633 edition of Gerard famously carries an image of a bunch of bananas that were hung outside an apothecaries shop.   Strangely I can’t find it actually mentioned by Parkinson in the text, apart from as an aside when he is discussing the qualities of mandrake.

Most striking of all is of course the  pineapple. In fact as I’ve said elsewhere Parkinson had almost certainly never seen a pineapple BUT he will have read about them and probably seen illustrations, as would have the artist. However he used their shape to describe other plants. For example, “The fair Curled haire iacinth” has at “the toppe a bush or tuft of flowers which at the first appearing , is like unto a Cone or pine-apple’, whilst “The Great Spanish Starry Iacinth of Peru” has a similar arrangement, “fashioned in the beginning, before they bee blowne or separated” also “very like unto a Cone or pine-apple.”Of course “pineapple” when he used it like that didn’t mean pineapple as in the picture.  It meant  pine-cone which were also commonly called pineapples at the time.

Even though Parkinson was highly observant and usually based his work on what he really knew, the inclusion of what we now know to be a  mythical plants says a lot about the state of botanical knowledge at the time. While the illustrations in the text are drawn from life, those on the frontispiece  engraving still have elements of the travellers’ tale.  If you look behind where Adam is grafting you can see a sheep growing on a stem or trunk.

This is a “Scythian lamb”, sometimes called  a barometz. It’s almost certainly one of the exaggerations of travellers accounts of the cotton plant, but unscrupulous merchants faked “Scythian lambs” out of parts of an Asian fern Cibotium barometz.  It’s a great story and I’ve written about this elsewhere at greater length.

But however impressed you are by his book and its illustrations,  Parkinson, ever modest,  warns those who “compare Art with Nature and gardens with Eden” because they are trying to  “measures the stride of the elephant by the stride of the mite and the flight of the eagle by that of the gnat.”  As I’m sure you’ve realised, in terms of his contemporaries it’s him who is the elephant or eagle and he didnt need to be so modest.

For more information, apart from browsing the book, a good place to start is Nature’s Alchemist by Anna Parkinson [no relation] 2007