John Gerard (also John Gerarde, 1545–1612) was an English herbalist with a large garden in Holborn, now part of London. His 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. Except for some added plants from his own garden and from North America, Gerard's Herbal is largely a plagiarised English translation of Rembert Dodoens' 1554 herbal, itself highly popular in Dutch, Latin, French and other English translations. 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. Two decades after Gerard's death, the book was corrected and expanded to about 1,700 pages.

Life

Early life and education

Gerard was born at Nantwich, Cheshire, towards the end of 1545, receiving his only schooling at nearby Willaston, about two miles away. Nothing is known of his parentage, but the coat of arms on his Herball implies he was a member of the Gerards of Ince. Around the age of 17, in 1562, he became an apprentice to Alexander Mason (died 3 April 1574), a barber-surgeon of the Company of Barbers and Surgeons in London. Mason had a large surgical practice and had twice held the rank of Warden in the company, and later became Master. Gerard did well there, and was admitted to freedom of the company on 9 December 1569 and permitted to open his own practice. Although he claimed to have learned much about plants from travelling to other parts of the world (see for instance a letter to Lord Burghley in 1588), his actual travels appear to have been limited. In his later youth, he is said to have made one trip abroad, possibly as both a ship's surgeon and captain's lover on a merchant ship sailing around the North Sea and Baltic, for he refers to both Scandinavia and Russia in his writings. He relinquished the lease to Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury.

According to Anna Pavord, Gerard was a doer and not a scholar.

Notes

References

Bibliography

Books and articles

  • (see also The Jewel House)
  • (also here at Biodiversity Heritage Library)

Encyclopaedias

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Websites

  • Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries – This site has high resolution images of works by and about John Gerard (in .jpg and .tiff format) and includes a copy of Gerard's 1597 Herbal in which the drawings have been coloured by hand.
  • Title page and selected woodcuts from a 1633 edition of Gerard's The herball, or, Generall historie of plantes (all images freely available for download in a variety of formats from Science History Institute Digital Collections at digital.sciencehistory.org.
  • Complete version of 1633 edition, fully-illustrated and in modern spelling, at the Ex-Classics website; can be read online or downloaded in text, pdf, or epub formats.