John Parkinson's 'Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris' (1629)

John Parkinson’s Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (1629) is a landmark in English horticultural literature. This title page presents a familiar vision of a garden as paradise. The title, a pun on Parkinson’s name, may be literally translated as ‘Park-in-sun's earthly paradise’. Parkinson considered the Paradisi to represent all the plants of the pleasure garden, and dedicated it to Henrietta Maria (1609-1669), the wife of Charles I (1600-1649).

The title page, a woodcut, made by the German artist Christopher Switzer (fl. 1593-1611), is in whimsical contrast to the evidence-based contents of the book. The east and the west winds (Perpetual Spring) are represented in the upper corners. In the lower corners two vases are filled with a variety of flowers widely cultivated in seventeenth-century England.

In the centre, a Lilliputian Adam and Eve are shown in the Garden of Eden, overseen by the Tetragrammaton, the Hebraic name of God. Adam appears to be engaged in grafting a scion onto a tree. Grafting was well known by the early seventeenth century and an important technique for the propagation of plants such as apples and grapes. Eve appears to be picking a strawberry; under the Doctrine of Signatures, a belief prevalent in the period, the nature of a man’s ‘triple regions’ might be found in the triple-leaves of strawberries. The great diversity of plants (which includes a carnation, a lily, a tulip, and a cyclamen) are not depicted to scale.

To the right of Eve, on the far bank of the river is ‘Musa Serapionis’ or ‘Adams Apple tree’ (the image is copied from the first edition of Gerard’s Herball (1597)), which is thought to be the banana. Above Adam and his tree is a sheep tethered by its navel, this is the mythological creature called a barometz, Scythian lamb or vegetable sheep. The creature is usually thought to be a misunderstanding of the plant that produces cotton. Until the mid-eighteenth century there was a vigorous, and lucrative, trade in vegetable sheep between Central Asia and Europe. Enterprising eastern traders fashioned the creature from the hairy underground stems of a species of Asian fern, Cibotium barometz; the second part of the modern scientific name commemorates this use.

Despite Parkinson’s broad vision he warns the reader, in the motto at the base of the page, against hubris: ‘for whoever tries to compare Art with Nature and gardens with Eden measures the stride of the elephant by the stride of the mite and the flight of the eagle by that of the gnat’.