BOOK REVIEW:
Mr. Marshal’s Flower Book
I love garden books so much that my bookshelves are listing under the weight of my collection. Reference volumes have always been in the minority on my shelves because I favor books that go beyond the “how” of gardening, to the “why” of gardening. After all, I can do an internet search and find five thousand articles on how to plant a tomato, but I find it infinitely more enlightening to turn to a book like The Sixty-Four Dollar Tomato to get a highly personal view on the glories and frustrations of growing tomatoes in the home garden. With time and motivation at a premium, garden literature gives me the inspiration I need to go out and do less-than-inspiring jobs like turning the compost and clipping the privet.
On gift-giving occasions, my family and friends enable my literary habit by presenting me with horticulture-related books. This holiday season, I received an especially winning volume, Mr. Marshal’s Flower Book, by Alexander Marshal. The detailed and beautiful flowers that live within its pages have stimulated my mind and soothed my soul.
Alexander Marshal, the seventeenth century author of the Flower Book, undoubtedly referred to his magnum opus as a “florilegium,” a Latin word used to describe a compendium of plant and flower information and/or illustrations. The tradition of florilegia goes back to at least the fifteenth century and continues to the present day. Notable examples include Hortus Eystettensis by Basilius Besler, another early seventeenth work that depicts flowers in the botanical garden developed by the Prince Bishop of Eichstatt in Germany; and the contemporary florilegium commissioned by England’s Prince Charles to celebrate the plants in his garden at Highgrove.
Marshal’s work, devoted to illustrations of flowering species, is the only surviving example of a seventeenth century English florilegium. It was republished in 2008, in a hardcover edition that includes a short biographical chapter and notes about the plants portrayed on the pages.
Biographical information about Marshal is limited, but he was probably born about 1620 and died about 1682. He was a man of wealth and refinement, though it appears that he was a self-taught artist. His friends included many of the intellectual and scientific luminaries of his day, most notably the celebrated John Tradescant, the Younger, whose family museum of curiosities was the foundation of Oxford’s modern day Ashmolean Museum.
In the seventeenth century, the gardens of wealthy Englishmen became home to an increasing number of newly introduced plants from the various parts of the world touched by the British, either by exploration, colonization or diplomacy. Marshal included scores of these new plants, along with some English natives, among the 284 plant species in his book. There are tulips and lilacs, originally from the Middle East, for example, and sunflowers from America. In keeping with the traditional organization of florilegia, the illustrations are arranged seasonally.
The most amazing thing about those illustrations is the vibrant colors, for which Marshal was celebrated in his own time. Red and yellow flamed tulips pop off the pages and the delicate variations in the shades of ornamental sweet peas are carefully depicted. Some pictures, like those of the “mourning iris” and common sunflower also feature insects or small mammals, portrayed in the same highly detailed fashion. Marshal painted leaves, flowers and fruit as they were, complete with blemishes and imperfections. One painting of strawberry fruits, stems and leaves depicts a single berry afflicted with the gray mold or botrytis that still causes headaches for home gardeners.
Mr. Marshal’s Flower Book was intended to be instructional as well as celebratory. The illustrations allowed his contemporaries–and generations to come–to study all the details of the various plants, including the structures of both new and familiar flowers, leaves and fruits. When I study this florilegium, I long to see my own plants in flower again. To dive into the pages of Mr. Marshal’s Flower Book in January and February is to defeat winter–at least for awhile.