Gerard
is the best known of all English herbalists. He was a
barber-surgeon but his energies were employed chiefly
in horticulture. For twenty years he had a renowned
garden in a fashionable London district. In 1596 he
issued a list of plants which he cultivated, which is
the first complete catalog ever published of the
contents of a single garden. Gerard's reputation rests
principally upon his The Herball or Generall
Historie of Plants (1597). Gerard's herbal is not
original. It was based on the work of Dodoens and de
L'Obel. It contains 1,800 woodcuts of which only a few
are new. One represents the potato which is believed
to be the first figure of the plant ever published.
Nearly all illustrations are from the blocks used by
Tabernaemontanus in 1590.
The first edition held the field without a
competitor for more than a generation. Thomas
Johnson's revision greatly improved the herbal by
Gerard. The title page shows two draped figures,
Theophrastus on the left and Dioscorides on the
right.
