John Gerard

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. Deborah Harkness notes that Gerard was not part of the community of Lime Street naturalists in London at the time. His flawed (from the perspective of some of his contemporaries) Herball is dedicated to Burghley. He surrounded himself with influential friends and contacts, including Lancelot Browne, George Baker, and the apothecaries James Garrett, Hugh Morgan and Richard Garth. Garret was a Huguenot living and working in London, and a neighbour of the Flemish botanist Matthias de l'Obel (also known as Lobelius). Many of these had fine gardens and would exchange plants. Garth, who described Gerard as "a worshipful gentleman and one that greatly delighteth in strange plants" had South American contacts from where he would import rarities. He also exchanged plants with Clusius and cultivated a certain "Captain Nicholas Cleet of the Turky Company" from whom he obtained specimens from the Middle East. He would also 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. His servant, William Marshall travelled to the Mediterranean on his behalf and Jean Robin, the French king's gardener sent him seeds. After his death in February 1612 he was buried at the parish church of St Andrews, Holborn. ==Work==

{{multiple image |header = Illustrations from the Herball (1597) |align = right |direction = vertical |width = 140 |float = none Catalogue of Plants 1596 Gerard's 1596 Catalogue (Catalogus arborum, fruticum, ac plantarum tam indigenarum, quam exoticarum, in horto Johannis Gerardi civis et chirurgi Londinensis nascentium) 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. The Yucca failed to bloom in his lifetime, but a pip taken from the plant later bloomed for a contemporary. To this day Yucca bears the name Gerard gave it. The list was the first catalogue of this type ever produced. The only known copy is in the Sloane collection at the British Library. L'Obel wrote an introduction to the text. George Baker describes the garden in his preface to the Herball as "all manner of strange trees, herbes, rootes, plants, floures and other such rare things, that it would make a man wonder, how one of his degree, not having the purse of a number, could ever accomplish the same". A revised edition in 1599 by John Norton, the Queen's Printer, placed the English and Latin names in opposite columns. Herball 1597 The publisher and Queen's Printer John Norton proposed to Gerard an English translation of Dodoens' popular herbal, Stirpium historiae pemptades sex (1583). This was a Latin version of an earlier work in Flemish by Dodoens, his Cruydeboeck (Herb Book, 1554). It had been translated into English in 1578 by Henry Lyte as A Niewe Herball and proved popular. 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. Although Gerard acknowledges Priest's role, he implies that he died before starting the work. As curator of the College garden, he would have been familiar with Priest and his work. The completed book appears to include much of Priest's work, with his own completion of the text in the form of annotations from his own garden, and for the first time, some North American plants. An example is the first English description of the potato, which he mistakenly believed came from Virginia, not South America (see illustration). He 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. It is thought to be a disguise for the original source. In the preface ("To the courteous and well-willing Readers"), Gerard acknowledged Priest's efforts, but claimed the work was his own; "and since that Doctor Priest, one of our London Colledge, hath (as I heard) translated the last edition of Dodonaeus, which meant to publish the same; but being prevented by death, his translation likewise perished: lastly, my selfe one of the least among many, have presumed to set foorth unto the view of the world, the first fruits of these mine own labours" This led to Gerard being accused of plagiarism, and even of being a "crook". The work, published in 1597, was his Great Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes. This edition reused hundreds of woodblocks from Jacobus Theodorus Tabernaemontanus' Kräuterbuch or Eicones Plantarum seu stirpium (Frankfurt, 1590), which themselves had been reused from earlier 16th-century botanical books by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Rembert Dodoens, Carolus Clusius, and L'Obel. Gerard's lack of scientific training and knowledge led him to frequent inclusion of material that was incorrect, folkloric or mythical, such as the barnacle tree that bore geese (see illustration). Nevertheless, the work, including over 1,000 plants in 167 chapters remained popular, providing in English information about the names, habits and uses ("vertues") of many plants known and rare. It was seen as the best and most exhaustive work of its kind and a standard reference for some time. Publication controversy Modern authorities disagree on how much of Gerard's Herball was original. Garret made a chance visit to the Norton publishing shop, where he discovered the proofs of the Herball and alerted the Nortons both to errors he discovered in the proofs and the incorporation of some of L'Obel's material. This is recounted by L'Obel in his Stirpium illustrationes (1655), which accuses Gerard of plagiarism. Although the Norton firm was not concerned about plagiarism, it feared errors in a book that was supposed to be an expert reference guide. It hired L'Obel as an internationally recognised expert on plants, who as Gerard's friend had unwittingly contributed to his book, to proof the translations, fix the mismatched illustrations and right the textual wrongs. When Gerard discovered L'Obel's thankless efforts, he had him dismissed. Although Gerard was an experienced collector and plantsman, he lacked L'Obel's scholarship, as is clear in his dedication to Burghley, where he presents himself as a gardener. Gerard dismissed L'Obel's criticisms as being due to unfamiliarity with English idioms. Norton decided to proceed with publication despite these difficulties. He 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, Gerard was then faced with the difficulty of matching them to the text and frequently mislabelled them. ==Selected publications==

• (2nd edition 1599) • (Internet Archive version: also here at Botanicus and here at Biodiversity Heritage Library) • Index p. 1392 • • Index p. 1633 • • Index p. 1678 ==Legacy==

After Gerard's death in 1612, an enlarged, revised and corrected edition of the Herball appeared in 1633 and as a third edition in 1636. These were edited by Thomas Johnson, a London apothecary and botanist, commissioned by the heirs to the estate of John Gerard. Johnson's edition contained many corrections and new empirical observations. He added over 800 new species and 700 figures. Through anecdotal comments, Johnson carefully distanced himself from the original. For example, he wrote of the entry on the saffron crocus, "Our author in this chapter was of many minds." The plant drawings in the 1633 and 1636 editions used hundreds of woodblocks originally made for an edition of Rembert Dodoens's original herbal, the basis of Gerard's work. These were shipped from Antwerp to London. ==Notes==