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Introduction: English-speaking

Our most diligent searcher of old Herbals, Miss Eleanour Sinclair Rohde, in The Old English Herbals, thus dwells on Gerard's charm: "His Herbal gripped the imagination of the English garden-loving world, and now, after the lapse of three hundred years, it still retains its hold on us. There are English-speaking people the world over who may know nothing of any other, but at least by name they know Gerard's Herbal. . . . One reads his critics with the respect due to their superior learning, and then returns to Gerard's Herbal with the comfortable sensation of slipping away from a boring sermon into the pleasant spaciousness of an old-fashioned fairy-tale. For the majority of us are not scientific, nor do we care very much about being instructed. What we like is to read about daffodils and violets and gilliflowers and rosemary and thyme and all the other delicious old-fashioned English flowers. And when we can read about them in the matchless Elizabethan English we ask nothing more."

When reading Gerard we are wandering in the peace of an Elizabethan garden, with a companion who has a story for every flower and is full of wise philosophies. We are admiring his Violets: "It would be an unseemly thing", says he, "for him that doth look upon and handle fair and beautiful things, and who frequenteth and is conversant in fair and beautiful places, to have his mind not faire, but filthy and deformed." He inspires us with his own simple faith in the healing virtues of herbs. We must agree that Sweet Marjoram is for those who are given to over-much sighing; that the smell of Basil is good for the heart, takes away sorrowfulness and makes a man merry and glad. We shall lament the passing of the cunning cook who would serve the old salad-dishes; we do not doubt that Chervil roots are excellent in a salad, "if they be boiled and after dressed as the cunning cook knoweth how better than my selfe; which is very good for old people that are dull and without courage; it rejoiceth and comforteth the heart, and increases their lust and strength". Courage!--we may need it ourselves though not dull nor old, and where more easily could we find it than in a tankard flavoured with Borage?-- I Borage Bring alwaies Courage.

Many things a cunning cook might make for us of Borage, for the driving away of sorrow and increasing the joy of the mind. In these times none strews Water-mint or the flowers of Meadow-Sweet in chambers to make hearts merry and delight the senses. Apothecaries no longer give us seeds of the Paeony in wine or mead to cure the Night Mare, or distil an oil of Cow Parsnip to assuage the Forgetful Evil, make us a garland of Penny-royal if we swim in the head, or a charm of Trefoil whereby no harm can come to us from the biting of any venomous beast. No more does the cunning housewife store that root of Solomon's Seal which takes away in one night or two at the most any bruise gotten by women's wilfulness in stumbling upon their hasty husbands' fists and such like.

With special delight we listen to our companion as he greets his flowers by their old English names: Live-for-ever, Herb Impious, Birds eyne, Jackanapes-on-horseback, Go-to-bed-at-noon, or the Childing Daisy. He tells us where he gathered his treasures, many in London: Bugloss in "Piccadilla", Clary in fields of Holborn, Mullein about Highgate, Lilies of the Vale on Hampstead Heath, Sagittaria in the Tower ditch, Mallow hard by the place of execution, Tyburn, or the Pimpernel Rose in a pasture near the village called Knightsbridge. Passing into the kitchen garden, we are reminded that our host was one of the first to grow Potatoes, and the first to print a picture of what he named the Virginian Potato. In fine, his "Herball", like Parkinson's "Paradisus", is truly a "Speaking Garden", one filled with a tranquil loveliness, with brave colours and the fragrance of damask roses. II.