HISTORY, HEALTH AND HORTICULTURE: PEACEFUL BRITAIN
In Britain, the real Golden Age of herbs and herb gardens began in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, when the wars of the barons and knights ended and relative peace descended. With increased security, the peasants returned to cultivate the land, and the lords set out to keep up with the Joneses. Rivalry between noble families no longer flourished on the battlefield, but each now sought to outstrip the other in the size and opulence of his home and the imagination and ingenuity of his gardeners and cooks. The formal herb garden evolved from those same monastery gardens, which were often planted in the form of a cross or diagonally-crossed square. Now the wealthy set their gardeners to constructing all manner of intricate designs, seeking to please the eye by art as well as nature. Sometimes the gardens were laid out in the form of heraldic animals, or the owner’s coat-of-arms, or even his initials. Francis Bacon wrote very scathingly of these practices “. . . images cut out in juniper or other garden stuff, they be for children. As for the making of knots or figures, they be but toys. . . .” And indeed they were, as the herbs grown were more for ornament than use. But the herbs grown in the kitchen gardens, and the gardens of the peasants, were most certainly for use, and were often the only physic available.
As the herbs from other lands came to be better known and more widely used, interest in the health values of British native plants was also stimulated. William Turner (1510-68) has been called the father of British botany for his work in the classification and naming of many native British plants found in the ditches and hedgerows and woodlands. These plants were now to come under scrutiny as sources of readily available herbal preparations. Nicholas Culpeper (1616-54) one of the best-known of the British herbal healers, became a physician after studying ancient Greek and Arabian medicine at Cambridge. He was a rebel—a man with a fierce antagonism towards the orthodox schools of medicine, which ridiculed his methods and beliefs. He remained poor and died penniless, having never refused help to any sufferer. The doctors criticized him not for his lack of skill or knowledge, but for the amazing number of cures he effected, claiming he must have used witchcraft: it was not possible to cure so many patients! How familiar that must sound to the many practitioners of natural medicine, even today!
Culpeper’s predecessor, John Gerard (1545-1612), another British herbalist, was, though dedicated, somewhat fanciful in many of the properties he attributed to herbs. He often cribbed from other writers (not always accurately), and many of his more far-fetched remedies are quoted by those opposing the use of herbs in health or sickness.
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