102 THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS 



1596 Gerard published a catalogue of twenty-four pages of the 

 plants in this garden the first complete catalogue of the plants 

 in any garden, public or private. 1 A second edition was 

 published in 1599. Of Gerard's knowledge of plants the members 

 of his own profession had a high opinion. George Baker, one 

 of the " chief chirurgions in ordinarie " to Queen Elizabeth, 

 wrote of him : "I protest upon my conscience that I do not 

 thinke for the Knowledge of plants that he is inferior to any, 

 for I did once see him tried with one of the best strangers that 

 ever came into England and was accounted in Paris the onely 

 man, 2 being recommended to me by that famous man M. Amb. 

 Parens ; and he being here was desirous to go abroad with some 

 of our herbalists, for the whiche I was the means to bring them 

 together, and one whole day we spent therein, searching the 

 most rarest simples : but when it came to the triall my French 

 man did not know one to his fewer." In 1598, the year after 

 the publication of his Herbal, and again in 1607, Gerard was 

 appointed examiner of candidates for admission to the freedom 

 of the Barber-Surgeons' Company, but apart from this we have 

 little definite knowledge of his life. He seems to have been a 

 well-known figure in the later years of Elizabeth and the early 

 years of James I., and it is probable that he held the same 

 position in the household of Robert Earl of Salisbury, Secretary 

 of State, as he had held in that of his father, Lord Burleigh. A 

 few years before he died James's queen (Anne of Denmark) 

 granted him the lease of a garden (two acres in all) east of 



1 Conrad Gesner drew up a codified list of choice plants cultivated in the 

 gardens of about twenty of his friends, with short lists of rarities in certain 

 gardens. Johann Franke published his Hortus Lusatice in forty-eight pages 

 a very scarce work which is a catalogue of all the plants growing near Launitz 

 in Bohemia. The list contains both wild and cultivated plants, and the latter 

 are distinguished by the addition of the letter H. 



2 This must have been Jean Robin, who in 1597 was appointed Keeper 

 of the King's gardens in Paris. We know that Gerard was on intimate terms 

 with him, and Robin sent him numerous plants, which he gratefully acknow- 

 ledges in his Herbal. Gerard frequently speaks of him as " my loving friend 

 John Robin." 



