Take a close look at this image of the Garden of Eden which appears on the title page of John Parkinson’s Paradisi in Sole. How many of the plants can you identify? Are there any there you don’t recognise?
I was talking about this to an audience recently and explaining that some, like the cyclamen crocus and grapevine were plants which Parkinson probably grew in his garden, alongside relatively newly introduced exotics such as tulips and sunflowers.
But it also included plants, such as the pineapple that he’d never actually seen and strange to report even one plant which we now know never even existed, although it had a long history in travellers tales and still lives on in legend. Although the audience worked out which plant it was none of them had a clue what it really was.
Any ideas?
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