40
THE GARDENS OF WARLEY PLACE,
BRENTWOOD, ESSEX.
By J. C. SHENSTONE, F.L.S.
[With Plates III., IV. and V., and four other illustrations.]
ESSEX has figured in books upon plants and gardens from
the time when English gardening emerged from the
obscurity of the medieval period. Our county was a favourite
collecting ground of John Gerard (1545-1612), who wrote the
first "Herbal" in the English language, and we learn from this
book that Gerard explored Essex very thoroughly in search
of plants. About one hundred years later John Ray (1627-
Warley Place.
1705) was born at Black Notley, where he lived during the
later period of his life, and where most of his scientific work
was accomplished. John Ray was one of the great botanists
of the world, and one of the first to classify plants successfully;
indeed, much of his work is accepted at the present day. During
the same period Samuel Dale (1659-1739), an apothecary and
physician at Braintree, and a friend of Ray's, wrote his Pharma-
cologia, one of the most useful of the later "Herbals."1 Passing
by another hundred years, we find Samuel Curtis, a celebrated
gardener, and for some time proprietor of Curtis' Botanical
1 See History of Botany in Essex, by Professor G. S. Boulger, F.L.S., in Essex Naturalist
vol. xi., pp. 61-68 and pp. 169-173.