GERARDE AND THE GERARDIAS. 395 



GEKAKDE AND THE GEEAEDIAS: THE HEKBALIST 

 AND HIS NAMESAKES. 



Br MARTHA BOCK^E FLINT. 



ON shaded hillsides and in woodland glades there blooms through 

 August, a stately plant, the most beautiful of a varied group 

 which, as the genus Gerardia, perpetuates a name too little honored. 

 Eew men have done more for English botany than the " diligent 

 and paineful apothecary," John Gerarde, some time gardener to 

 Cecil, Lord Burleigh. It is just three hundred years since, in 

 December, 1597, was published The Herball, or Generall Historic of 

 Plantes Gathered by John Gerarde of London, Master in Chirurgerie. 

 The second edition thereof, the only copy known to be in the city 

 of New York, is " very much enlarged and amended by Thomas 

 Johnson, Citizen and Apothecary," and bears the imprint " London, 

 printed by Adam Islip, Joice Norton and Richard Whitaker, anno 

 1633." On the frontispiece of the thick folio is Gerarde's title, given, 

 above, inscribed upon an oval supported by Corinthian columns, and 

 bordered by six woodcuts. At the head of the page is represented 

 the sun bursting through clouds, and on its disk is a triangle bearing 

 a Hebrew legend ; below are the words from Genesis : " Ecce dedi 

 vohis omnes herhas semen tantes semen quae sunt J' In the upper 

 corners are figures of Ceres and of Pomona, offering grains and fruits. 

 At the left of the columns stands Theophrastus, a scroll in one hand, 

 in the other flowers; at the right, Dioscorides holds an open book. 

 Beneath the title is the portrait of Gerarde, supported on either side 

 by vases heaped high with pyramidal masses of fruits and flowers. 

 The face is the serious countenance of the sixteenth century: oval, 

 with a pointed beard ; a long, straight nose, well-arched eyebrows, and 

 deep-set eyes, fixed, as if looking into the hidden mystery of life : 



" Little flower, but if I could understand 

 What you are, root and all, and all in all, 

 I should know what God and man is." 



It is a sad face, but with the serenity of a meditative mind. He 

 wears the quilled ruff and the embroidered doublet of the period, and 

 holds in his hand a spray — perhaps of wild rose. Here is not the 

 exactness which marks Gerarde's own drawings. 



The book is dedicated to " The right Honourable, his Singular 

 good Lord and Master, Sir William Cecil," and is written from his 

 " House at Holborn within the Suburbs of London, this first of 

 December, 1597." Holborn — named from Old Bourne, a branch of 

 the Fleet — was itself a rural region which then afforded a fair field 



