Lot 251: PARKINSON, JOHN.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION

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 of all manner of herbes, rootes, & fruites, for meate or sauce used with us, and An Orchard of all sorte of fruit-bearing Trees and shrubbes fit for our Land together with the right ordering planting & preserving of them and their uses & vertues... London: H. Lownes and R. Young, 1629

folio (339 x 212mm.), fine pictorial woodcut title, woodcut portrait of Parkinson, 3 small and 110 full-page woodcuts, eighteenth-century green-brown morocco gilt with double gilt borders and internal design at centre, spine gilt in compartments with morocco lettering-pieces, leaves washed, binding faded at spine, upper joint splitting at foot, some waterdamage to end-papers, corner of lower cover worn

Henrey 282; Hunt 215; Nissen BBI 1489

Sir Charles Cayzer, bookplate

first edition of the earliest important treatise on horticulture published in england. "This book is of interest and value as a record of the state of horticulture in England at the beginning of the seventeenth century... Parkinson describes a great number of plants many of which grew in his own garden in Long Acre, and in his book refers frequently to contemporary botanists and gardeners" (Henrey pp.163-64).