22 Facts About John Gerard

John Gerard was an English herbalist with a large garden in Holborn, now part of London.

John Gerard's 1,484-page illustrated Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, first published in 1597, became a popular gardening and herbal book in English in the 17th century.

John Gerard's Herball drawings of plants and the printer's woodcuts are mainly derived from Continental European sources, but there is an original title page with a copperplate engraving by William Rogers.

John Gerard was born at Nantwich, Cheshire, towards the end of 1545, receiving his only schooling at nearby Willaston, about two miles away.

John Gerard married Anne, who died in 1620, and by her had five children, of whom only one, Elizabeth, survived them.

John Gerard spent his entire adult life in London, close to Barnards Inn, between Chancery Lane and Fetter Lane.

John Gerard received offers to supervise the gardens of noblemen.

In 1588, Burghley was Chancellor of the University of Cambridge and John Gerard wrote to him commending himself as a suitable superintendent of the university botanic garden, writing "to signe for ye University of Cambridge for planting of gardens".

John Gerard relinquished the lease to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury.

Deborah Harkness notes that John Gerard was not part of the community of Lime Street naturalists in London at the time.

John Gerard surrounded himself with influential friends and contacts, including Lancelot Browne, George Baker, and the apothecaries James Garrett, Hugh Morgan and Richard Garth.

John Gerard exchanged plants with Clusius and cultivated a certain "Captain Nicholas Cleet of the Turky Company" from whom he obtained specimens from the Middle East.

John Gerard would visit other collectors and nurserymen such as Richard Pointer of Twickenham, Master Fowle, keeper of the queen's house at St James and Master Huggens, keeper of the garden at Hampton Court.

John Gerard's 1596 Catalogue is a list of 1,039 rare plants he cultivated in his garden at Holborn, where he introduced exotic plants from the New World, including a plant he misidentified as Yucca.

John Gerard was not Norton's first choice, the translation having originally been commissioned from Dr Robert Priest, a member of the London College of Physicians, who had meanwhile died.

John Gerard then incorporated some unpublished material from L'Obel and material from the work of Clusius, which he rearranged to follow more closely L'Obel's scheme of his 1570 Stirpium adversaria nova.

When John Gerard discovered L'Obel's thankless efforts, he had him dismissed.

John Gerard dismissed L'Obel's criticisms as being due to unfamiliarity with English idioms.

John Gerard decided against using Dodoens' original illustrations since this would have revealed the actual source of the material, but instead rented woodblocks from Nicolaus Bassaeus in Frankfurt, about 1,800 in all, only 16 being original.

However, John Gerard was then faced with the difficulty of matching them to the text and frequently mislabelled them.

John Gerard added over 800 new species and 700 figures.

John Gerard worked within the early wave of Renaissance natural historians, who sought to systematise natural history while retaining the works of the ancients.