112 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



gardening book, as distinguished from the herbals. His last 

 work, " The Gardener's Labrinth," was said to be by " Didynrus 

 Mountain," a pun on his own name common at the time. His 

 designs and descriptions for herb borders of intricate figures were 

 so popular as to be adopted in the Chelsea Botanical Garden in 

 later years, and Hill's notions about " divers herbers, knots, and 

 mazes," cunningly handled for the beautifying of gardens, 

 survived even Bacon's sarcasm, and exist to-day in too many of 

 our public gardens in the shape of bedding-out and carpet-bed- 

 ding designs. 



1557. The next popular author appears to have been Thomas 

 Tusser, who wrote " A Hundredth Pointes of Good Housbandrie " 

 in 1557, but he is much better known by his amplification of 

 this work called the " Five Hundredth Pointes of Good Husbandry, 

 united to as many of Good Huswiferie," published in 1573. 



Tusser, like Arthur Young, failed as a farmer, though he gave 

 very good advice about it in his books. His jingling rhymes no 

 doubt lent themselves to ready memory, and were in their way a 

 revival of "Jon the Gardener's" poem, already alluded to in this 

 paper as existent in the library at Trinity College, Cambridge. 

 It would be very interesting if it could be shown that Tusser, 

 who was for some time at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1574, 

 imbibed his idea of poetical agriculture from the old MS. on 

 poetical gardening. At any rate, I ask the question : Is it 

 possible that Tusser, before he lived at Cambridge in 1574, could 

 have seen or heard of the old MS. alluded to ? 



We now come to the golden days of Elizabeth and her Lord- 

 Treasurer Cecil, the epoch in which Shakespeare himself 

 appears. In 159G Gcrarde published the first English catalogue 

 of garden plants, and in 1597 his "Great Herbal" was issued 

 fresh from the printer's hands. The manner in which this work 

 was produced is this: John Norton, the Queen's printer, had 

 commissioned a Dr. Priest to translate the " Pemptades " of 

 Kembert Dodoens from Latin into English, but he died ; and in 

 some way Gerarde appears to have obtained the translation and 

 actually used it as the backbone of his book. To mask the fact, 

 however, he rearranged the manuscript, using the system of 

 Lobel instead of that of Podoens. Then, to further buckram out 

 the work, Norton obtained wood blocks from the continent, some 

 say from Frankfurt, but more probably from the then celebrated 



