John Parkinson (botanist)
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John Parkinson (1567-1650) was the last of the great English herbalists and almost the first of the great English botanists, for he was apothecary to James I, and a charter member of the Society of Apothecaries in December 1617, and on the committee that published their London Pharmacopoeia, 1618. Then, on the cusp of the new science, he was botanist to Charles I. His two great books are Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris ("Park-in-Sun's terrestrial Paradise") of 1629, with the explanatory subtitle A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permit to the noursed vp, and the monumental Theatrum Botanicum ("The Botanical Theater") published in 1640 at the author's age of 73.
The earlier work, which describes proper cultivation of plants in general, was in three sections, the flower garden, the kitchen garden, and the orchard garden. Parkinson hinted that he hoped to add a fourth section, a garden of simples (medicinal herbs). Theatrum Botanicum delivered the promise: it describes over 3800 plants and was the most complete and beautifully presented English treatise on plants of the day. Parkinson was part of the closely-connected English and Continental botanists of the generation that began to see extraordinary new plants coming from the Levant and from Virginia, broadly speaking. He edited the papers of his colleague Matthias de Lobel, who had spent the final years of his life in Highgate supervising the gardens of Edward, Lord Zouche, and he presented them in Theatrum Botanicum.
His London house was in Ludgate Hill, but his botanical garden, perhaps two acres in extent, was in suburban Long Acre, a district of market-gardens, today close to Trafalgar Square.
