THE HISTORY OF THE BOTANICAL MAGAZINE Vil 
numerous Continental editions of a book similar in character 
under the title of Ortus Sanitatis, or ** Garden of Health ;” 
the oldest at Kew having been printed at Mainz, in 1485. 
It is a thick quarto, with numerous coarse woodcuts, which 
have been rudely coloured by hand. 
The Grete Herball is a small quarto book, and the prin- 
cipal object of it, as of all the early works on plants, was to 
set forth the medicinal virtues of herbs, shrubs and trees. 
Although it is not filled with the gross astrological super- 
stitions of some later works, the numerous virtues ascribed 
to almost every plant mentioned give an idea of the almost 
incredible ignorance of medicine in those days. 
TURNER. 
William Turner (about 1510 to 1568), who has been 
styled the Father of Botany in England, was the author of 
the first original English work on plants,’ of which Mr, 
Daydon Jackson edited a fac-simile reprint in 1877. This 
is a little more than a catalogue of only about 170 species 
of plants, and the forerunner of his excellent Herbal, the 
foundation of English botanical literature. 
ut I must not dwell on this, as it belongs to a period 
perhaps wholly antecedent to the practice of flower garden- 
ing for ornamental purposes in England. Be that as it 
may, before the end of the sixteenth century several notable 
gardens existed in the vicinity of London, the most cele- 
brated being that of the oft-cited John Gerard at Holborn. 
Gerard published a catalogue of the plants cultivated in 
his garden in 1596, and an amended and extended one in 
1599. It is hardly necessary to state that a great majority 
of the plants were cultivated for their real or imaginary 
medicinal properties. Still the catalogue contains a con- 
siderable number of plants that would only have been 
cultivated for ornamental purposes. Most of the extra- 
European plants enumerated are American, and the only 
possibly South African plant is the Senecio (Kleinia) 
Anteuphorbium, which I suspect is really a native of the 
Red Sea region; but for an analysis of the contents of 
Gerard’s catalogue the reader is referred to the Gardeners’ 
Chronicle, n.s., ix., p. 865, March 23rd, 1878. 
Flower gardening, it should be explained, was practised 
in France, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy, long 
' Libellus de Re Herbaria Novus, 1538. 
* Reprinted by Mr. Daydon Jackson in 1576. 
