The Lasting Presence of Gerard's Herball

goal was identification, and discovery of the grass’s virtues. Perhaps she had intentions
for the seeds. I remembered Johnson’s observation about the connection between flax
seeds and these very pages, between which the preserved flower rested:
…this paper whereon I write, that first from seed became flaxe; then after much
vexation thread; then cloth, where it was cut and mangled to serve the fashions of
the time, but afterward rejected and cast aside; yet unwilling so to forsake the
service of man for which God had created it, again it comes (as I may term it) to
the hammer, from whence it takes a more noble form and aptitude to be imployed
to sacred, civil, foreign, and domestic uses.
I closed the book and contemplated the many transformations of plants, ideas, images,
and people that came together to create it and pass it along. The tooling on the cover, a
single unbroken indentation, was impressed with a roller rather than a stamp, according
to Sandra. To me it was a delicate symbol of continuity, nothing particularly remarkable,
almost unnoticeable, tracing the edge of a calf hide cover. Inside someone wrote, “an
unusually fine copy.”
I returned to pages “370 and 371” and the fragile grass florets. I did not want to touch
them again, and it occurred to me that picking a spikelet of grass in order to identify it
was a particularly American thing to do. The Puritans’ need for an herbal was especially
urgent, and Gerard’s Herball was one of three English herbals that were carefully
transported across the Atlantic. (Gerard’s Herball, John Parkinson’s Paradisi, and
Nicholas Culpeper’s Herbal are discussed at length in Ann Leighton’s Early American
Gardens.) While the Puritans had these reference books, they had left the place—and the
plants—upon which the herbals were based. They needed a field guide, and an herbal of
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