JOHN PARKINSON 143 



Herball, John Tradescant, 1 the famous gardener, traveller and 

 naturalist, and the celebrated physician, Sir Theodore Mayerne. 

 Parkinson died in 1650 and was buried at St. Martin's in the 

 Fields. There is a portrait of him in his sixty-second year 

 prefixed to his Paradisus, and a small portrait by Marshall at 

 the bottom of the title-page of his Theatrum Botanicum. 



The full title of Parkinson's Paradisus, which in the dedicatory 

 letter to Queen Henrietta Maria he truly describes as " this 

 Speaking Garden," is inscribed on a shield at the bottom of the 

 frontispiece. The first three words, " Paradisi in Sole," are a 

 punning translation into Latin of his own surname. 



At the top of the page is the Eye of Providence with a Hebrew 

 inscription, and on each side a cherub symbolising the winds. 

 In the centre is a representation of Paradise with Adam grafting 

 an apple tree and Eve running downhill to pick up a pineapple. 

 The flowers depicted are curiously out of proportion, for the tulip 

 flower is a good deal larger than Eve's head, and cyclamen in 

 Paradise seems to have grown to a height of at least five 

 feet. 



The most interesting feature of this elaborately illustrated title- 

 page is the representation of the " Vegetable Lamb " growing on a 



1 Both John Tradescant and his son were gardeners to Charles I. and 

 Henrietta Maria. John Tradescant the elder is said by Anthony a Wood 

 to have been a Fleming or a Dutchman, but this is doubtful. The name is 

 neither Flemish nor Dutch but probably English, and in the inscription on 

 his tomb in Lambeth Churchyard he and his son are described as " both 

 gardeners to the rose and lily queen." This was Henrietta Maria. Parkinson 

 in his Paradisus speaks of him as " that painfull industrious searcher and 

 lover of all nature's varieties." Tradescant accompanied Sir Dudley Digges 

 on his voyage round the North Cape to Archangel, and on his return wrote 

 an account of the plants he had found in Russia the earliest extant record 

 of plants in that part. It is interesting to note that in this he compares the 

 soil of Russia to that of Norfolk. In 1620 Tradescant joined an expedition 

 against the Algerine corsairs as a gentleman volunteer, and he also accom- 

 panied the Duke of Buckingham (George Villiers), to whom he had formerly 

 been gardener, on the ill-fated expedition to La Rochelle. On Buckingham's 

 death he entered the royal service, and probably at this time established his 

 well-known physic garden and museum at Lambeth. The house was called 

 Tradescant's ark. There are three unsigned and undated portraits of the 

 elder Tradescant in the Ashmolean Collection at Oxford. 



