John Gerard

John Gerard
Frontispiece of 1636 edition of Herball
Born	1545 Nantwich, Cheshire, England
Died	1612 (aged 66–67) London, England
Resting place	St Andrews, Holborn
Other names	John Gerarde
Known for	The book Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes
Scientific career
Fields	Botany
Author abbrev. (botany)	J.Gerard

John Gerard (also John Gerarde, 1545–1612) was an English herbalist with a large garden in Holborn, now part of London. His 1,484-page illustrated Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, first published in 1597, became a popular gardening and herbal book in English in the 17th century. Except for some added plants from his own garden and from North America, Gerard's Herbal is largely a plagiarised English translation of Rembert Dodoens's 1554 herbal, itself highly popular in Dutch, Latin, French and other English translations. Gerard's Herball drawings of plants and the printer's woodcuts are mainly derived from Continental European sources, but there is an original title page with a copperplate engraving by William Rogers. Two decades after Gerard's death, the book was corrected and expanded to about 1,700 pages.