INTRODUCTION n 



Sorbiere, a French physician travelling in 1664, considered 

 the Garden "more like an orchard than a garden." * 



Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach f visited the Garden in 

 August, 1710, and found it full of plants, but with few rarities. 



Like other visitors he mentions the fine yews, the best he 

 had seen on his travels, and describes Hercules at one end 

 and a pair of flower-vases standing on columns at the other. 

 But what surprised him most was the appearance of the 

 Professor, which ill accorded with the high esteem in which he 

 was held. " Bobart," wrote Uffenbach, " had an ugly type of 

 countenance and an evil appearance. His nose was unusually 

 long and pointed, eyes small and deeply sunk, mouth awry, 

 with next to no upper lip, a great deep scar furrowed his cheek, 

 and his face and hands were as black and coarse as those of 

 the veriest labourer. His clothes, and especially his hat, were 

 in bad state, and his wife, who accompanied him, was old and 

 dirty. Such was the aspect of the Herr Professor that no one 

 would have taken him for anything but a gardener, and, as a 

 matter of fact, he devotes himself principally to garden work, 

 and also, with praiseworthy energy, to bringing out the book 

 of his predecessor, Morison. But he is a good horticulturist 

 rather than a scientific botanist. 



" He showed us round the garden and all that he had with 

 great willingness. There were a great number of plants, but 

 the collection was not equal to that at Leyden or at Amsterdam. 

 The arrangement was nothing remarkable, but somewhat 

 irregular. The rarer plants were all grouped at the end of the 

 garden in an enclosure and behind the house; in the middle 

 of the garden were common culinary vegetables run wild. 

 Behind the house in which he lived is a small garden and a 

 small Orangery, built of stone in the centre, but with a small 



* Boase's " Oxford." But Celia Fiennes, circ. 1695, found great diver- 

 sion and pleasure : " the variety of flowers and plants would have entertained 

 one a week." She also described the new Library. 



t Z. C. von Uffenbach's " Reise," Ulm, 1754. 



