PARKINSON (John). 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, & fruites, for meate or sause used with us, and an Orchard of all sorte of fruitbearing Trees and shrubbes fit for our Land together with the right orderinge planting & preserving of them and their uses & vertues, Collected by John Parkinson Apothecary of London.1629

London: Humfrey Lownes and Robert Young [colophon], First edition, first issue, folio (325 x 200 mm), [12], 612, [16]pp., an elaborate woodcut title page by Christopher Switzer which shows the Garden of Eden plated with a variety of exotic species recently introduced to Europe, woodcut portrait of the author, title closely trimmed, 109 full-page woodcuts and 3 woodcuts in the text, woodcut head- and tail-pieces and initials, closed tear to head of A4, professional paper repair to lower blank margin of final two leaves (just touching a couple of letters), slight worming mainly at head of some leaves affecting a few heading letters, otherwise a very nice clean copy, marbled endpapers, later nineteenth-century full brown morocco by Worsfold, minor white specks to boards, spine with five raised bands with fleur-de-lis tooling to compartments, second lettered in gilt direct, all edges gilt. This being the first edition, first issue of the work with the old usage of the letters u and v throughout. It is regarded by Hunt as being "one of the most beloved of all early English books of gardening, about which so much is written that little need be said." Little is known of other than he "was a herbalist and gardener born in Nottinghamshire, who in 1616 was actively practising as a pharmacist in London. He received the title of 'Apothecary' from James I, and after the publication of his herbal, Charles I had him named 'Botanicus Regius Primarius' (First botanist to the King)."—Johnston. Parkinson's book is based on the contents of his own garden and gives complete picture of the English garden at the beginning of the seventeenth-century. It describes nearly 1,000 plates, mostly ones cultivated in his garden at Long Acre in London. STC, 19300; Hunt, 215; Henrey, 282; Johnston, 179.