Gardening.- John Parkinson

Gardening.- John Parkinson

Paradisi in sole Paradisus Terrestris. Or a garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up: with a kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes, and fruites, for meate or sause used with us, and an orchard of all sorte of fruitbearing trees and shrubbes fit for our land together with the right orderinge planting and preserving of them and their uses and vertues, First edition, woodcut portrait of Parkinson to **6 verso, full-page woodcut of garden design, woodcut ornaments and 109 full-page botanical woodcuts, a few smaller woodcut illustrations to text, slight browning, intermittent dampstaining worsening towards end, dustsoiling, tears to blank margin of Gg8 & Bbb, and to Rr3 (affecting woodcut headpiece), tiny worm trail to blank margin of Ll-Oo, and to gutter of Bbb-Ddd, last few leaves severely damaged or holed at gutter (Eee3 to end of volume) with loss of text, signature of Thomas Fleming, later half calf, new endpapers, rather worn, hinges split, rear board coming loose, [Henrey 282; Hunt 215; Nissen 1489; STC 19300], folio, Humfrey Lownes & Robert Young, London, 1629.

*** First edition of 'the earliest important treatise on horticulture published in England' (Henrey). Parkinson was apothecary and botanist to Charles I. The book is filled with references to contemporary botanists and gardeners, and it provides one of the best single sources of information on gardening practices and styles in early 17th-century England.