Paradisi in Sole Paradisus. or A Garden of all sorts of Pleasant Flowers ... a Kitchen Garden ... and an Orchard

John PARKINSON (1567-1750).

Title: Paradisi in Sole Paradissus Terrestri, or a Garden of all sorts of Pleasant Flowers which our English Ayre will permit to be noursed up: A Kitchen Garden of all manner of Herbes, Rootes, & Fruites, for Meate or Suace used with us.  And an Orchard of all sorte of Fruitbearing Trees and Shrubbes fit for our land together with the right order for orderinge planting & preserving of them and their uses and vertues. 

Place of publication, publisher, date: [colophon: London: Humfrey Lownes & Robert Young,] 1629.

Folio (13 x 8 1/2 inches; 330 x 216 mm). Woodcut allegorical title of the Garden of Eden by A. Switzer, woodcut portrait of Parkinson facing A1, 110 full-page and three small woodcut text illustrations, woodcut initials, head- and tailpieces. (Resewn with some leaves shorter,  supplied from another copy, difficult to be precise about the number of supplied leaves as some may just have been 'moved' during the resewing, the title with some chipping to the blank margins, small tears to two final leaves, some toning). Contemporary speckled calf, neatly resewn onto kid 'cords' and rebacked to style by Courtland Benson of Vancouver (neat repairs to corners).

Provenance: early marginal notes to some pages in the Kitchen Garden and Orchard sections, see  pp.463-472, 537-540; 'Gooseberry Vinegar' recipe on front blank, dated 1740; Ernest Augustus I, King of Hannover (1771-1851, ink stamp to verso of dedication leaf).

The King of Hannover's copy of the first edition of this notable herbal and "the earliest important treatise on horticulture published in England" (Henrey).

The woodcut title-page is signed in the block by A. Switzer, a German artist living in England. He is almost certainly responsible for the fine woodcut text illustrations depicting over 750 varieties of plants (including fifty varieties of anemones and over 150 different tulips). "Though it makes little appeal to the scientific botanist, it does give a very complete picture of the English garden at the beginning of the seventeenth century and in such a delightful ... style that gardeners cherish it even to the present day" (Hunt). From the distinguished collection of Ernest Augustus, who was the fifth son of King George III of Great Britain.

STC 19300; ESTC S115360; Cleveland 179; Henrey 282; Hunt 215; Mellon Oak Spring Flora 40; Nissen BBI 1489.