The second installment of the Gardens Trust series on 17th and 18th Century books of Natural History will take place February 13 online. This ticket is for this individual session and costs £5, and you may purchase tickets for the entire series at a cost of £16 via the link here. Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and a link to the recorded session (available for 1 week) will be sent shortly afterwards.

One of the treasures of Oxford’s Bodleian Library is a rare early-seventeenth-century manuscript which once belonged to the virtuoso, collector and founder of the Ashmolean Museum, Elias Ashmole. Catalogued in the seventeenth century as ‘A Book of Fruit Trees with their Fruits, drawn in Colours’, from the nineteenth century it has been known misleadingly as ‘Tradescant’s Orchard’ from a reference in it to the royal gardener John Tradescant. It appears, however, to have been compiled by an unidentified garden owner in the circle of Tradescant, John Parkinson (author of Paradisi in Sole), John Goodyer, and others who were enthusiastically importing and cultivating wide varieties of new plants and fruits during the second and third decades of the seventeenth century.

The talk will discuss the context and possible purposes of the manuscript, and the sources in needlework pattern books for the un-naturalistic and very colourful insects and animals which embellish many of the folios. Henrietta McBurney MVO, FLS, FSA, is an art curator and art historian. She worked as curator in the Print Room of the Royal Library, Windsor, for nearly 20 years. Subsequently she was keeper of fine and decorative art at Eton College, and curator of collections at the Garrick Club and Newnham College, Cambridge; she has since worked free-lance as a curator for Cambridge colleges. She has a particular interest in the intersection of art and science and has recently published Illuminating Natural History. The Art and Science of Mark Catesby (Paul Mellon Centre/Yale, June 2021). Other publications include studies on the 17th-century Florilegium of Alexander Marshal and Birds, Other Animals and Natural Curiosities, the natural history drawings for Cassiano dal Pozzo’s Paper Museum.