446 ESSEX AND THE EARL Y BOTANISTS.
English botany may be said to begin with Dr. William
Turner, who was Dean of Wells in the reign of Edward VI., and
who published the first edition of his Herbal in the year 1551.
In this herbal, which is now a very scarce book, he describes
upwards of three hundred British species ; and in many instances
he gives the exact localities in which he had found the plants
growing. These entries are the earliest records of the kind in
English literature, and are therefore of exceptional interest to the
lover of country life. Essex, however, was not one of the
counties best known to 'Master Dr. Turner.' The localities he
chronicles are chiefly in Northumberland, his native county,
about Cambridge where he was educated, in the neighbourhood
of his Deanery at Wells, and in Kent and Middlesex. He states,
however, that mistletoe and the butcher's broom are to be found
in Essex, and of one rare plant he gives the exact locality. The
green hellebore, or 'Syterwurt,' grows, he says, 'in greate plentye
in a parke besyde Colchester;' and this, it is interesting to
remember, is the earliest record of the locality of a native plant in
the Essex flora. Whether it is still to be found in Turner's
habitat seems doubtful; but the plant flourishes in several
localities in the county, and may be seen in some abundance in a
small spinney not far from the village of Roxwell, once the re-
sidence of the poet Quarles, and where he prepared his Emblems
for publication.
Some thirty years after the death of Dr. Turner, Gerarde's
famous Herbal appeared. The first edition, dedicated to his
'singular good Lord and Master' Sir William Cecil, Lord High
Treasurer of England, was published in 1597. and it is to this
quaint and curious book that the botanist must go in order to
discover—with the few exceptions already mentioned—the earliest
localities of Essex plants. This engaging work, which is 'the
parent of all succeeding books which bear the name of herbal,'
will ever be of peculiar interest to the botanist. Though in the
main a translation of Dodonaeus's Pemptades, it yet contains a
large amount of original matter, such as the localities of rare
plants, and many quaint allusions to places and persons now of
considerable antiquarian interest. Gerarde, who occupied the
position of 'herbarist' to James I., had a large physic-garden at
Holborn, one of the first of its kind in England, where he
cultivated, we are told, 'near eleven hundred sorts of plants;'
he also appears to have made frequent expeditions into various
parts of the country, on what were then termed 'simpling-voyages,'