A Compleat Herbal

James Newton's folio herbal shows the plants themselves: copperplate engravings of everything an eighteenth-century physician or gardener might need to recognise, from asphodels and adder's tongue to the mandrake and the mulberry.

Home › The Physick Garden

The Physick Garden

What eighteenth-century England called its plants, and what that tells you.

Newton’s herbal is a book of pictures, not prose — 171 copperplates and an index to find your way around them. The index is the surprise: 394 names, and almost every one of them is an argument about what the plant was for.

  1. The whole book is 171 engraved plates and almost no text. A physician was expected to recognise a plant by looking at it, not by reading about it.Read it: The Plates
  2. The finding aid runs to 394 entries — the herbal's own index, each name pointing at the plate the plant is engraved on.Read it: The Plant Index
  3. “Wort” is simply the Old English word for a plant, which is why the index is full of them: Birthworts, Dropworts, Fleawort, Glasswort, Honywort, Liverwort, Lungworts, Masterwort, Milkworts, Moonwort, Motherwort and Navel-wort, among others.Read it: The Plant Index
  4. A striking number of names are diagnoses. Liverwort, Lungworts, Motherwort, Navel-wort and Birthworts each announce the organ or occasion they were meant to treat — the prescription is built into the name.Read it: The Plant Index
  5. Devil's Bit is in here, at Tab. 134 — named for a root that looks bitten off short.Read it: Plate 134 of 171
  6. So are Dragons, at Tab. 94, filed in the index as calmly as cabbages.Read it: Plate 94 of 171
  7. Adder's Tongue (Tab. 109) is one of a whole menagerie of names taken from animals' body parts: Harts-tongue, Goats-beard, Haresfoot, Goosfoot, Dogstooth, Dogstones and Mouse ears all appear in the same index.Read it: Plate 109 of 171
  8. Mouse ears at Tab. 49 — a name given for the shape and softness of the leaf, and one of the few that survived into modern gardening.Read it: Plate 49 of 171
  9. Several names are frank about killing things: Henbane, Dogsbane, Fleabanes and Fleawort. A “bane” is a poison, and the plant is named for what it was used to poison.Read it: The Plant Index
  10. Moonwort (Tab. 70) and Archangell (Tab. 114) sit a few pages apart — one named for the crescent shape of its leaflets, the other simply promoted to the angelic hierarchy.Read it: Plate 70 of 171
  11. Lady Smocks, Lady and Virgin Bowers, and Allheal of Esculapius show the three registers this vocabulary worked in at once: the domestic, the devotional, and the classical.Read it: Plate 99 of 171
  12. “Dyers-weed or Would” (Tab. 104) is weld — the yellow dye plant. It was still being used a century later to bulk out counterfeit cochineal.Read it: Plate 104 of 171
  13. Clavers Catterpillars at Tab. 21: a plant named after the insect its seed pods were thought to resemble.Read it: Plate 21 of 171
  14. Some plants were too important for one plate and got two — Bindweeds, Dogsbane, Fleabanes, Knapweeds, Lady Smocks and Dogstooth each run across a pair.Read it: The Plant Index
  15. A single plate could carry a whole orchard's worth of varieties. Plate 156 names Peach, Almund, Roman red, Rectorian, Lawrell peach and Turky Plum together.Read it: Plate 156 of 171
  16. The atlas ends where a garden ends — at the trees. The last plate, number 171, is given to firs and pines.Read it: Plate 171 of 171
  17. The book's list of earlier authorities notes that William Turner's herbal of 1548 and 1551 gave plant names in Greek, Latin, English, Dutch and French — a working botanist needed all five to read his colleagues.Read it: Country the Authors Were Of: Botanicum
  18. Also listed: Marcellus Virgilius, Secretary to the State of Florence, who published Dioscorides in Greek and Latin with his own commentary. Renaissance botany was largely done by government officials in their spare time.Read it: Country the Authors Were Of: Botanicum
Rights & ReuseThe complete text of A Compleat Herbal (1752) is in the public domain in the United States — like all works published before 1928 — and is free to read, download, quote, teach from, and reuse. This digital edition (its transcription, restored images, and site design) is © 2026 PhotoOpAI, and any editorial commentary we add is clearly marked as ours; the underlying public-domain text carries no such restriction.