Life
Gerard was born at Nantwich, where he received his early and only schooling. Around the age of 17 he was apprenticed as a barber-surgeon. Although he claimed to have learned much about plants from travelling to other parts of the world, his actual travels appear to have been limited. For example, at some time in his later youth, he is reputed to have made one trip abroad, possibly as a ship’s surgeon on a merchant ship sailing around the North Sea. In 1577, he began to supervise the London gardens of William Cecil, Lord Burghley. By 1595, Gerard had become a member of the Court of Assistants in the Barber-Surgeon's Company. By 1595, he was spending much time commuting from the court to his gardens in the suburb of Holborn, and attending to his duties for Burghley. In 1597, he was appointed junior warden of the Barber-Surgeons, and in 1608, master of the same. Gerard was a doer, not a thinker, and an outsider in relation to the community of Lime Street naturalists in London at the time. His somewhat flawed (from the perspective of some of his contemporaries) Herball is dedicated to Burghley.
Read more about this topic: John Gerard
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)