Note 89 — Chapter VI · JOHN PARKINSON, THE LAST OF THE GREAT ENGLISH HERBALISTS

Both John Tradescant and his son were gardeners to Charles I. and Henrietta Maria. John Tradescant the elder is said by Anthony à Wood to have been a Fleming or a Dutchman, but this is doubtful. The name is neither Flemish nor Dutch but probably English, and in the inscription on his tomb in Lambeth Churchyard he and his son are described as “both gardeners to the rose and lily queen.” This was Henrietta Maria. Parkinson in his Paradisus speaks of him as “that painfull industrious searcher and lover of all nature’s varieties.” Tradescant accompanied Sir Dudley Digges on his voyage round the North Cape to Archangel, and on his return wrote an account of the plants he had found in Russia—the earliest extant record of plants in that part. It is interesting to note that in this he compares the soil of Russia to that of Norfolk. In 1620 Tradescant joined an expedition against the Algerine corsairs as a gentleman volunteer, and he also accompanied the Duke of Buckingham (George Villiers), to whom he had formerly been gardener, on the ill-fated expedition to La Rochelle. On Buckingham’s death he entered the royal service, and probably at this time established his well-known physic garden and museum at Lambeth. The house was called Tradescant’s ark. There are three unsigned and undated portraits of the elder Tradescant in the Ashmolean Collection at Oxford.