Home > Special Collections > Exhibitions > Cultivating Gardens >

Case three

Domestic gardening

Until the 16th century, domestic gardening was treated as one aspect of husbandry, which also included the raising of cereals, the planting of orchards and hedgerows, the maintenance of pasture, and the care of animals. Elizabethan country housewives obtained their gardening advice from Thomas Tusser's rhyming calendar, Five hundred pointes of good husbandrie, which covered all the necessary duties of the husband and his ‘huswife'. But specialist apothecaries' gardens also existed and the necessary practical advice on growing medicinal plants was sometimes incorporated in their herbals.

As a boy, Thomas Tusser (1524? - 1580) was a talented chorister and this enabled him to get a good education and a career as a musician. But he yearned for a farming life, like that of his forebears, and saved enough money to become a lease-holding farmer. His first calendar of farming operations was A Hundreth Goode Pointes of Husbandrie (1557). After he married, he added a further hundred points on ‘huswifry' (1570) including gardening. By 1573 his popular doggerel calendar had grown to five hundred points. Tusser had a long run of misfortunes as a farmer, and died in a debtors' prison in 1580. This edition is based on the last one issued in his lifetime (1580).

List of items

John Gerard's reputation rests principally upon his Herball or generall historie of plants (1597). It was not original. It was based on the work of Rembert Dodoens and de L'Obel. It does however contain original gardening advice, based on Gerard's personal experience in his own garden at Holburn, London, and as the curator of the College of Physicians' garden. After his death in 1612, the apothecary Thomas Johnson revised the herbal, correcting its mistakes and replacing most of the ‘borrowed' illustrations. The Johnson edition appeared in 1633.

List of items