Hamish Riley-Smith

PARKINSON,John. Paradisi in sole Paradisus Terrestris. Or A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre permitt to be noursed uo: with A Kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes, & fruites, for meate or sauce used with us, and An Orchard of the right orderinge planting & preferuing of them and their uses & all sorte of fruit bearing Trees and shrubbes fit for our Land together with vertues. London, Humfrey Lownes and Robert Young 1629

Folio, fine contemporary calf, covers double blind ruled, (6) + 612pp + (8), printed in double columns, complete with fine engraved title by C.Switzer with at the top the Eye of Providence with a Hebrew inscription and on each side a cherub symbolising the winds; and in the centre a representation of Paradise with Adam grafting a tree and Eve running downhill to pick up a pineapple; and with the Vegetable Lamb growing on a stalk and browsing on the herbage round about it, one of the curious myths of the Middle Ages, with the portrait of John Parkinson and 109 full page woodcuts by Switzer, mostly after Clusius and Lobel, illustrating plants and including 6 garden plans, decorated printers woodcut devices to chapter openings, 17th century ownership inscription in ink on front blank leaf of Gualtheri Taylor et amicorum, later book plate of St Andrew Ward Esq Hooton Pagnell in Yorkshire, a very attractive copy.

First edition. The earliest work to separately describe and illustrate the flower & vegetable gardens & the orchard. The title is a punning translation into Latin of Parkinson's surname. Dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, nearly a thousand plants are described and 780 are illustrated in the 109 plates, the wood-blocks for which were specially cut in England.
John Parkinson was born in 1567 and before 1616 he was practising as an apothecary. Throughout his life Parkinson was an enthusiastic and skilful gardener and had a garden in Long Acre "well stored with rarities". He was appointed Apothecary to James I, and after the publication of his Paradisus in 1629 Charles I bestowed on him the title of Botanicus Regius Primarius. The portrait in this book shows Parkinson in his sixty-second year. "Parkinson's significance as a gardener is indicated by his close friendships with many other major gardeners of his day and refers to them in this work including William Coys of Essex, John Tradescant the elder, and John Gerard...Parkinson's garden was of considerable size. A total of 484 types of plants are recorded as having grown there...if the size of his garden alone is considered, Parkinson was one of the most important gardeners of the early 17th century in England." Riddell.
STC, 19300. Henrey I, 282. Hunt, 215. Nissen, 1489, Plesch, 356. Pritzel, 6933. Rohde, The Old English Herbals, pp.142-151. John Riddell, John Parkinson's Long Acre garden 1600-1650 in Journal of Garden History, Vol 6,no.2 1986 pp.112-124.

£7650

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