We know from Gerard’s coat of arms that he was descended from a younger branch of the Gerards of Ince, a Lancashire family, but there are no records at the College of Arms to show his parentage. His name is frequently spelt with an e at the end, but Gerard himself and his friends invariably spelt it without. (The spelling “Gerarde” on the title-page of the Herbal is probably an engraver’s error.) John Gerard was born at Nantwich in Cheshire in 1545, and educated at the school at Wisterson or Willaston, two miles from his native town. In the Herbal he gives us two glimpses of his boyhood. Under raspberry we find:—
“Raspis groweth not wilde that I know of.... I found it among the bushes of a causey neere unto a village called Wisterson, where I went to schoole, two miles from the Nantwich in Cheshire.”
Writing of yew[77] he tells us:—
“They say that if any doe sleepe under the shadow thereof it causeth sickness and sometimes death and that if birds do eat of the fruit thereof it causeth them to cast their feathers and many times to die. All which I dare boldly affirme is altogether untrue: for when I was young and went to schoole divers of my schoole-fellowes and likewise myselfe did eat our fils of the berries of this tree and have not only slept under the shadow thereof but among the branches also, without any hurt at all, and that not one time but many times.”
It is supposed that at an early age he studied medicine. In his Herbal he speaks of having travelled to Moscow, Denmark, Sweden and Poland, and it is possible that he went abroad as a ship’s surgeon. This, however, is mere surmise. We know that in 1562 he was apprenticed to Alexander Mason, who evidently had a large practice, for he was twice warden of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company. Gerard was admitted to the freedom of the same company in 1569.[78] Before 1577 he must have settled in London, for in his Herbal he tells us that for twenty years he had superintended the gardens belonging to Lord Burleigh in the Strand and at Theobalds in Hertfordshire. Hentzner, in his Itinerarium, gives a lengthy account of the gardens at Theobalds when Gerard was superintendent.
Gerard’s own house was in Holborn and, as already mentioned, his garden, where he had over a thousand different herbs, was in what is now Fetter Lane.[79] What a wonderful garden that must have been, and how full it was of “rarities,” ranging from white thyme to the double-flowered peach. How often we read of various plants, “these be strangers in England yet I have them in my garden,” sometimes with the triumphant addition, “where they flourish as in their natural place of growing.” In 1596 Gerard published a catalogue of twenty-four pages of the plants in this garden—the first complete catalogue of the plants in any garden, public or private.[80] A second edition was published in 1599. Of Gerard’s knowledge of plants the members of his own profession had a high opinion. George Baker, one of the “chief chirurgions in ordinarie” to Queen Elizabeth, wrote of him: “I protest upon my conscience that I do not thinke for the Knowledge of plants that he is inferior to any, for I did once see him tried with one of the best strangers that ever came into England and was accounted in Paris the onely man,[81] being recommended to me by that famous man M. Amb. Parens; and he being here was desirous to go abroad with some of our herbarists, for the whiche I was the means to bring them together, and one whole day we spent therein, searching the most rarest simples: but when it came to the triall my French man did not know one to his fower.” In 1598, the year after the publication of his Herbal, and again in 1607, Gerard was appointed examiner of candidates for admission to the freedom of the Barber-Surgeons’ Company, but apart from this we have little definite knowledge of his life. He seems to have been a well-known figure in the later years of Elizabeth and the early years of James I., and it is probable that he held the same position in the household of Robert Earl of Salisbury, Secretary of State, as he had held in that of his father, Lord Burleigh. A few years before he died James’s queen (Anne of Denmark) granted him the lease of a garden (two acres in all) east of Somerset House for four pence a year. Besides the rent he had to give “at the due and proper seasons of the yeare a convenient proportion and quantitie of herbes, floures, or fruite, renewing or growing within the said garden plott or piece of grounde, by the arte and industrie of the said John Gerard, if they be lawfully required and demanded.”[82] Gerard only kept this garden for a year. In 1605 he parted with his interest in it to Robert Earl of Salisbury, and it is interesting to note that in the legal documents connected with this transaction he is described as herbarist to James I. Of his private life we know nothing beyond that he was married and that his wife helped him in his work. He died in February 1611-1612, and was buried in St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn.
In 1597, as we have seen, Gerard published the Herbal which made him famous, but its history, as his critics point out, reflects little credit on the author. John Norton, the Queen’s printer, had commissioned Dr. Priest, a member of the College of Physicians, to translate Dodoens’s Pemptades from Latin into English. Priest died before he finished his work and the unfinished translation came somehow into Gerard’s hands. Gerard altered the arrangement of the herbs from that of Dodoens to that of de l’Obel in his Adversaria, and of Priest’s translation he merely says: “Dr. Priest, one of our London College, hath (as I heard) translated the last edition of Dodoens, which meant to publish the same, but being prevented by death his translation likewise perished.” There are no fewer than 1800 illustrations in the Herbal, most of them taken from the same wood-blocks that Tabernæmontanus (Bergzabern) used for his Eicones (1590). Norton, the Queen’s printer, procured the loan of these wood-blocks from Nicolas Bassæus of Frankfurt. They are good specimens, and certainly superior to the sixteen original cuts which Gerard added. It is interesting, however, to note that amongst the latter is the first published representation of the “Virginian” potato. Gerard made so many mistakes in connection with the illustrations that James Garret, a London apothecary (and the correspondent of Charles de l’Escluse), called Norton’s attention to the matter. Norton thereupon asked de l’Obel to correct the work, and, according to de l’Obel’s own account, he was obliged to make over a thousand alterations. Gerard then stopped any further emendation, on the ground that the work was sufficiently accurate, and declared further that de l’Obel had forgotten the English language. Mr. B. D. Jackson affirms that when one compares the Herbal with the catalogue of the plants in his garden Gerard seems to have been in the right. On the other hand, de l’Obel in his Illustrationes speaks of Gerard with great bitterness and alleges that the latter pilfered from the Adversaria without acknowledgment.
When one turns to the Herbal one forgets the bitterness of these old quarrels and Gerard’s possible duplicity in the never-failing charm of the book itself. It is not merely a translation of Dodoens’s Pemptades, for throughout the volume are inserted Gerard’s own observations, numerous allusions to persons and places of antiquarian interest, and a good deal of contemporary folk-lore. No fewer than fifty of Gerard’s own friends are mentioned, and one realises as one wanders through the pages of this vast book that he received plants from all the then accessible parts of the globe. Lord Zouche sent him rare seeds from Crete, Spain and Italy. Nicholas Lete, a London merchant, was a generous contributor to Gerard’s garden and his name appears frequently. Gerard writes of him: “He is greatly in love with rare and faire flowers, for which he doth carefully send unto Syria, having a servant there at Aleppo, and in many other countries.” It was Nicholas Lete who sent Gerard an “orange tawnie gilliflower” from Poland. William Marshall, a chirurgeon on board the Hercules, sent him rarities from the Mediterranean. The names which appear most frequently in connection with indigenous plants are those of Thomas Hesketh, a Lancashire gentleman, Stephen Bridwell, “a learned and diligent searcher of simples in the West of England,” James Cole, a London merchant, “a lover of plants and very skilful in the knowledge of them,” and James Garret, a London apothecary and a tulip enthusiast, who “every season bringeth forth new plants of sundry colours not before seen, all of which to describe particularly were to roll Sisiphus’s stone or number the sands.” Jean Robin, the keeper of the royal gardens in Paris, sent him many rarities. For instance, of barrenwort (Epimedium alpinum) he writes: “This was sent to me from the French King’s herbarist Robinus dwellying in Paris at the syne of the blacke heade in the street called Du bout du Monde, in English the end of the world.” In view of Sir Walter Raleigh’s well-known enthusiasm for collecting rare plants, it is at least possible that he may have been a donor to Gerard’s garden.
