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Feature of the month - September 2008

John Parkinson

John Parkinson

Statue of John Parkinson at Sefton Park, Liverpool. Photograph: Andrea Merciar.

John Parkinson was born in 1567 possibly at Nottinghamshire. From 1585 he was apprenticed for eight years to Francis Slater, a London apothecary. In December 1617 he joined the Society of Apothecaries becoming one of the five apothecaries consulted by the College of Physicians to advise on the compilation of their Pharmacopoeia Londinensis.

For the last decades of his life Parkinson devoted himself to the cultivation of his garden in Long Acre and to writing what turned out to be the first systematic work in English on the subject of gardening,

Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or, a garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up : with a kitchen garden and an orchard, published in 1629. The book's dedication to Queen Henrietta Maria earned for Parkinson the title of first botanist to the King (Botanicus Regius Primarius) awarded to him by Charles I. Its title translates as "A Park in the Sun" and is a Latin pun on Parkinson's surname. This book contains descriptions of nearly 1000 plants.

Parkinson's second work was Theatrum botanicum (pictured, below), published in 1640 and describing 3800 plants.

Both of Parkinson's books are held in the RSM Library.

Parkinson died in 1650 and was buried at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields close to his Long Acre garden.

Bibliography

John Parkinson. Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or, a garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up : with a kitchen garden and an orchard.
London : H. Lownes & R. Yound, 1629.

John Parkinson. Theatrum botanicum. The theater of plants; or, An herbal of a large extent, containing therein a more ample and exact history and declaration of the physicall herbs and plants that are in other authorus, encreased by the accesse of many hundreds of new, rare and strange plants from all parts of the world.
London., 1640.

Eleanour Sinclair Rohde. The old English herbals. London, 1922.

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