16 GARDENS PAST AND PRESENT 



for taking in hand the first reputable English 

 " Herball," which appeared nearly fifty years 

 before Gerard 's more ambitious work. 



It was not until 1632, when Charles I. was king, 

 that a plot of land near the bridge which crosses 

 the Cherwell, and lying between the water walks 

 of Magdalen College and the Christ Church 

 meadows, was given and endowed by the Earl of 

 Danby of that day, for the purposes of a physic 

 garden at Oxford. Those five acres were even 

 then historic ground, for they had been the site 

 of an old Jewish cemetery, not improbably secured 

 by the charter of Henry II., which gave rights 

 of burial to all Jews outside the walls of any 

 town where they might be permitted to congre- 

 gate ; and it is recorded that in Oxford itself there 

 once existed not only a ghetto, but a Jewish medi- 

 cal school, which no doubt at that time mainly 

 busied itself with the study of medicinal plants 

 brought over sea from the East. On this spot a 

 house was built for the keeper, with greenhouses 

 and stoves and all such appliances as were then 

 considered needful to the "excellent art of simp- 

 ling," as Gerard puts it. Sixteen years later a 

 catalogue was published of the sixteen hundred 

 plants, British and exotic, which had by that time 

 found a home in this, the first English physic 

 garden ; and here, no doubt, amongst the simples, 

 were grown rhubarb, a rare drug from Turkey, 

 and asarabacca and liquorice, with lavender and 

 rosemary, herb of grace, and peppermint and many 

 another comforting and medicinal plant. Before 

 that time no great excursions seem to have been 



