UPPER PICTURE

Henry Lyte 1529-1607 was born and lived all his life at Lytes Cary in Somerset. The house (see 1619 panel) now belongs to the National Trust. Lyte had a botanic garden there where we see one of his gardeners trimming the topiary whilst giving the glad eye to one of the housemaids. That garden, long gone was replaced by today’s Elizabethan style one laid out by Sir Walter Jenner in the 1900’s. Lyte’s real fame however, was as the author of his Niew Herbal published in London in 1578, a translation from the Flemish of Dodoens and dedicated to Queen Elizabeth. It became known as  ‘Lyte’s Herbal’ and so popular that it was reprinted in 1586, 1595 and 1619 and was still being so in 1678. Less well known today was the fact that he published a pedigree of the Kings of England and Scotland ‘proving’ their descent from Brutus the Trojan (See 1619 panel again). James 1st was delighted.

LOWER PICTURE

John Parkinson 1567-1650

Probably from Nottinghamshire, he was a herbalist who became the apothecary to King James 1st and we see him in the picture attending to the monarch who is applying liberal amounts of herbs to his meal at Theobolds in Hertfordshire. His first work was ‘Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris’, ‘or a garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers, with a kitchen garden …and an orchard’. (2 editions) Parkinson’s second great work was ‘Theatrum Botanicum’, ‘The Theatre of Plants or an Universall and Compleate Herbal’. It remained the most complete English treatise on the subject until the time of John Ray or Wray 1527-1713 one of the founders of the true principals of classification in the vegetable and animal kingdom.

GRAFTING TOOLS

C. Hammer with a File and Piercer D. Chisel

E. Chisel F. Mallet G. Vine Knife H. Saw