This was the catalogue of John Gerarde's garden at Holborn, where he introduced exotic trees, fruits, and plants from the New World, and also grew widely available English plants. The text was very basic, being essentially a plant list, the first list of its kind. The edition must have been relatively small since only one copy survived, in the Hans Sloane collection in the British Library. In addition to his career as a surgeon, Gerard was superintendent at the gardens of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, a position he continued in for more than 20 years. In 1586, the College of Physicians established a physic garden with Gerard as curator, a position he held till 1604.

In his garden catalogue Gerard listed over 1000 different trees, shrubs and plants that he was personally growing. In the revised second edition of 1599 he added English names for the plants.

Gerard is perhaps the best remembered of ail the English herbalists. The most important edition of his book is the second, published by T. Johnson in 1633 (reprinted in facsimile, New York, Dover, 1975). Johnson greatly enlarged the book, correcting many mistakes and bringing the number of plants included to a total of 2850. Gerard plagiarized much of his work from Dodoens (No. 1812). See B. Henrey, British botanical and horticultural literature before 1800, Vol. 1, pp. 35-54, 1975.

A very substantial expansion and update of Gerarde's herbal published in 1597. Besides correcting mistakes, Johnson added over 800 new species and 700 new figures, raising the number of plant descriptions in the work to about 2,850. Digital facsimile of the 1636 edition from the Internet Archive at this link.

Digital facsimile from Biodiversity Heritage Library at this link.