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TIMES, TUESDAY, APRIL 5
1924
XVIIth CENTURY
GARDENERS.
AN OXFORD COLLECTION.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES.
Sir—Lovers of the beautiful in flowers and
flower-painting will indeed be grateful to you
for drawing attention in The Times of
March 10 to the exquisite drawings by
Le Moyne, now on exhibition in the Victoria
and Albert Museum. The circumstances
which led to their "discovery" have also led
to further discoveries of interest sufficiently
wide to merit being put on record.
It was the finding of the papers of the
distinguished Hampshire botanist, John Goodyer,
of Petersfield, that has given a clue for the
recovery of many things of importance. In
1664 Goodyer bequeathed his scattered
books and botanical manuscripts to Magdalen
College. After two and a half centuries the
rearrangement of these papers has thrown
a flood of light on the work and lives of many
forgetting gardeners and horticulturists of the
Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, and suggested
further search. The tracing of Goodyer's
friends has led to the finding of the garden
records of these men, their letters and acquaintances; and so a mass of material has
collected after the manner of a snowball, from
which it is abundantly clear that there was
a real, thriving school of scientific botany in
England fully a hundred years before Linnaeus.
But it is difficult to break new ground in
the Elizabethan age without coming up
against the great names of the day. The
volume of drawings which Le Moyne dedicated
to the Earl of Arundel and to Sir Philip Sidney was only
one of a number of treasures which were the
consequence of a new investigation of the
Goodyer papers. Of special interest is a very
early copy of the Last Poem of Sir Walter
Raleigh, beginning "Even such is time," penned
in the margin of a letter, dated November
7, 1618, and therefore written within 10
days of his execution.
At that time the study of flowers and poetry
were never far apart, and so our searching for
plant-records of the period have frequently
led us into the domain of literary notes on the
broad margins of old herbal books, as in the
case of the marginal notes on the notes on the
broad margins of an old herbal book attributed
to Sir John Salusbury, the son of the celebrated
botanist, Sir John Salusbury, cousin to
Queen Elizabeth, popularly known as the
"Great Mother of Wales, and Sir John
Salusbury read the first English herbal of the
age, for it was at his request that Marlowe and
Shakespeare contributed poems to a volume
by Robert Cholmley, the first English poet.
And there is a MS. poem signed by Ben Jonson
among the Salusbury papers. Now,
Sir John Salusbury is recognized today as
a first authority on the flora of North
Wales, and among the Goodyer papers,
Herrick is recorded as having been a
Lineman living in Leicester. Newly identified
letters of the hand of John Parkinson, the
"last of the herbalists," (the handwriting
was previously unidentified), bid fair to
have been written since Sir Francis Baron drew
for information for his "Historia Plantarum"
among lists of plants from India, Arabia, the Levant,
the East Indies, the West Indies, and the New
World show what a trade existed in plants
during the early years of the 17th century,
and that the potatoe was only one out of many hundreds
exchanged in horticulture. Americans "of
Royal Indian descent" have recently learned that
a copy of Gerard's Herbal in Oxford had been
identified as having belonged to Dorothy
Rolfe, the Virginia-born daughter of Princess
Pocahontas. The many plant-lists, mainly
the oldest dates at which many plants are
known to have been grown in English gardens,
and the correspondence thereof, together
shows how garden lore was being diffused not
only in this country but over the known
world.
Yours, &c.,
K. F. GUNTHER
