Secret Gardens: A Bouquet of Botanical Treasures from the CHF Collections

From the ice they are freed, the stream and brook,
By the Spring's enlivening, lovely look;
The valley's green with joys of hope;
The Winter old and weak ascends
Back to the rugged mountain slope.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust I, "Easter Walk"

Exactly 200 years ago, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe let his hero Faust, an ambitious scholar, amble through nature one fine spring morning. While Goethe and his peers, the so-called romantic poets, liked nature best au naturel, others preferred the exquisite gardens which graced castles and parks all over Europe. Meanwhile, many natural philosophers gathered, investigated, classified, drew, and described plants.

Their botanical books and poetry on nature are well known to anyone interested in these subjects, even several hundred years after their publication. Yet there are other, less obvious places in books (and not only books on botany) where structured gardens in particular appear with some frequency: in frontispieces, i.e., decorative illustrations that appear opposite the title pages, or on the title pages themselves. Taken together, the gardens in CHF's library collections invite us to step lively and observe closely.

From pre-history to pleasure gardens
The history of gardening is probably as old as the first eye that distinguished between weeds and flowers, the first traveler who tried planting a flower from far away in his home soil, or indeed the first attempt to give a meadow a cut. In ancient Egypt and Babylon, Persia, Rome, Greece, and Byzantium, men with spades and green thumbs created refined mixtures of fruit trees and flower beds, rock elements and streams. Asian gardens were synonymous with beauty even 5,000 years ago.

In the Renaissance, however, gardening became a marriage of money and expertise: royals contracted professional gardeners to transform their extensive lands into their own private paradise, the pleasure garden. As a result, French castles like Versailles were surrounded by the so-called "Italian" gardens: symmetrical compartments of flower beds divided by gravel paths. The famous English gardens which became popular in the early 18th century, however, let trees and lawns sprawl over wide spaces, without obvious organization, and yet very carefully planned. Goethe himself designed an English garden in Weimar, the small town in the heart of Germany where he spent most of his life.

Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, Fundamenta botanica (1783)

Cultivating books
For early modern book lovers, whose books were printed before the invention of the dust jacket or the printed cover, the only way to find out the title and subject of a book was to open it to the title page. The long, descriptive titles often functioned almost like a table of contents, and were commonly formulaic in their style. However, sellers made the most use of the possibility to print pictures either on or beside the title page.

In the esteemed opinion of early modern publishers, an audience enjoying nature and art, authors and ancient authorities, the garden Eden and edifying garden culture would surely appreciate a well-organized illustration including flora and fauna! Thus, anything from individual flowers to fully grown designs of gardens appear at the beginning of books on botany and related items.

Consider, for instance, Johann Friedrich Henckel's Flora saturnizans of 1722. Henckel was the director of mines in the heart of Germany in the early 18th century, and his book investigates the chemical similarities between plants and minerals. On the frontispiece for Flora saturnizans, we see a beautifully planned garden above an underground mining scene, which implies that just as metals grow in the earth, so do plants grow above ground.

Another gardening book which depicts an architectural garden is Pierre Le Lorrain's Curiosities of nature and art in husbandry and gardening (1707). But here, the garden is shown before an agricultural scene, and flanked by Art and Nature personified. At the beginning of the 18th century, real beauty lay in the taming and fostering of nature with the artful methods of farming and gardening.

Herbal remedies
Many botanical books discussed the medicinal properties of plants – a hotly debated topic especially during the advent of chemical pharmacy. The frontispiece of Johann Michael Fehr's Anchora sacra (1666) shows at one glance a network of meanings and correspondences between plants and diseases, together with traditional symbols for the medical profession (especially the rod of Asclepius, the famous staff with the serpent winding around it). Nowadays, books on herbal cures are having a comeback, but unfortunately, they do not usually contain such fanciful pictures.

Elizabeth Fitton, Conversations on botany (1817)

Enter the botanist
In the days before authors' photos graced dust jackets, authors knew just as well how to set themselves in scene, and had their likenesses drawn on their title pages. The tradition of arranging a title page in sections, like small frames around the title itself, containing mythological and historical figures, is not unique to botanical books. But botanists clearly enjoyed surrounding their portraits with iconic persona from the history of their discipline!

One example is apothecary John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum (1640), the largest herbal in the English language, which describes the properties of almost 4,000 plants. He chose Adam, the first farmer; Solomon, the archetypal wise ruler; and four women who represent the four known continents of the time, to keep him company on the title page. In contrast, on John Gerard's Herball (1633) we see the author surrounded by Theophrastus, Aristotle's pupil who inherited the latter's library, including books on plants; and Dioscorides, who wrote a herbal entitled De Materia Medica in Pliny's time.

Today, we cannot reconstruct all the meanings and innuendos that would leap out of such a title page to a Renaissance gentleman or lady. But even a closer look at the intricate engravings, which otherwise often go unnoticed, is almost as refreshing as a stroll down a garden path.

Books shown on this page

• Giovanni Antonio Scopoli, Fundamenta botanica (1783)
• Elizabeth Fitton, Conversations on botany (1817)

Bibliography and further reading

• Pierre Pena and Matthias de l'Obel, Stirpium adversaria nova (1571)
• John Gerard, The herball, or, Generall historie of plantes (1633)
• John Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris, or, A garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up: with a kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes, and fruites, for meate or sause used with us, and an orchard of all sorte of fruit bearing trees and shrubbes fit for our land together with the right orderinge planting and preserving of them and their uses and vertues (1629)
• John Parkinson, Theatrum botanicum: The theater of plants, or An herball of a large extent (1640)
• Johann Michael Fehr, Anchora sacra; vel, Scorzonera (1666)
• Abbé de Vallemont (Pierre Le Lorrain), Curiositez de la nature et de l'art sur la végétation (English edition, 1707)
• Johann Friedrich Henckel, Flora saturnizans (1722)