Miller, Philip.

The Gardeners Kalender [Calendar]; Directing what Works are necessary to be done every month in the Kitchen, Fruit, and Pleasure-Gardens, as also in the Conservatory and Nursery. With Accounts – I. Of the particular Seasons for the Propagation of all sorts of Esculent Plants and Fruits, with the Seasons wherein each Sort is proper for the Table. II. Of all Sorts of Trees, Plants and Flowers with the Time of their flowering in each Month. By Philip Miller, Member of the Botanic Academy at Florence and Gardener to the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries at their Botanic Garden in Chelsea. The Eleventh Edition, Adapted to the New Style; With a List of Medicinal Plants, which may be gathered in each Month for Use.

London, Printed by Charles Rivington for John Rivington, at the Bible and Crown, in St.Paul’s Church-Yard and James Rivington and James Fletcher, at the Oxford-Theatre in Pater-noster Row, 1757. Octavo. Frontispiece, XVIII, 352 pages plus 11 unnumbered pages of a thorough Index and one page of advertising for “Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary …with Directions for the Culture of Vineyards and Making Wine in England”. Hardcover / Modern half-leather using the original boards of the 1757-Edition. New endpapers. This rare book is in excellent condition after a professional restoration of the binding. The interior pages and frontispiece-illustration in unusually stunning condition.

This early Garden – Calendar by famous english botanist Philip Miller, is structured the following way:

Each month of the year has its own section in which advice is given on what work is to be done in the Kitchen-Garden (mentions Mushroom-Beds, Cauliflower, Pottaoes, Garlic, Onions, Rocambole, Beets, Borecole, Celery, Endive, Mustard, Coriander, Tarragon, Mint and Asparagus, etc.) , in the Fruit-Garden (Pears, Apples, Gooseberries, Currants, Raspberries, etc.), which flowers to plant in the open air, which Hardy Trees and shrubs are in Flower, which Medicinal Plants are to be gathered in each month etc. etc.

The book is also going into work to be done in the Nursery and Greenhouse and Stove and gives advice on how to keep the frost of your orange-tree, advice to plant kidney-beans in February, planting Potatoes and Jerusalem-Artichokes toward the end of February etc. etc.

Every month gets more and more detailed throughout the year:

A fascinating read and self-help-book from the middle of the 18th century which has an abundance of advice on “Fruits in Prime or yet in laying” (Pears: Sucre-vert, La Casserie, La Marquise, Petit Oin, Ambrette, Spanish Boncretien etc.) / (Apples: Rennette Grise, Aromatic Pippin, Calville rouge, Holland Pippin, Harvey-apple, Pear usset etc. etc.)

Philip Miller FRS (1691 – 18 December 1771) was an English botanist and gardener of Scottish descent. Miller was chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden for nearly 50 years from 1722, and wrote the highly popular “The Gardeners Dictionary”.

Born in Deptford or Greenwich, Miller was chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden from 1722 until he was pressured to retire shortly before his death. According to the botanist Peter Collinson, who visited the physic garden in July 1764 and recorded his observation in his commonplace books, Miller “has raised the reputation of the Chelsea Garden so much that it excels all the gardens of Europe for its amazing variety of plants of all orders and classes and from all climates…” He wrote The Gardener’s and Florists Dictionary or a Complete System of Horticulture (1724) and The Gardener’s Dictionary containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen Fruit and Flower Garden, which first appeared in 1731 in an impressive folio and passed through eight expanding editions in his lifetime and was translated into Dutch by Job Baster.

Miller corresponded with other botanists, and obtained plants from all over the world, many of which he cultivated for the first time in England and is credited as their introducer. His knowledge of living plants, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, was unsurpassed in breadth in his lifetime. He trained William Aiton, who later became head gardener at Kew, and William Forsyth, after whom Forsythia was named. The Duke of Bedford contracted him to supervise the pruning of fruit trees at Woburn Abbey and the care of his prized collection of American trees, especially evergreens, which were grown from seeds that, on Miller’s suggestion, had been sent in barrels from Pennsylvania, where they had been collected by John Bartram. Through a consortium of sixty subscribers, 1733–66, the contents of Bartram’s boxes introduced such American trees as Abies balsamea and Pinus rigida into English gardens.

Miller was reluctant to use the new binomial nomenclature of Carl Linnaeus, preferring the classifications of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and John Ray at first. Linnaeus, nevertheless, applauded Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary, The conservative Scot actually retained a number of pre-Linnaean binomial signifiers discarded by Linnaeus but which have been retained by modern botanists. He only fully changed to the Linnaean system in the edition of The Gardeners Dictionary of 1768, though he had already described some genera, such as Larix and Vanilla, validly under the Linnaean system earlier, in the fourth edition (1754).

Miller sent the first long-strand cotton seeds, which he had developed, to the new British American colony of Georgia in 1733. They were first planted on Sea Island, off the coast of Georgia, and hence derived the name of the finest cotton, Sea Island Cotton.

The presumed portrait, engraved by C.J. Maillet and affixed to the posthumous French edition of Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary, 1787, shows the wrong Miller, John Frederick Miller, son of the London-based Nuremberg artist Johann Sebastian Müller. No authentic portrait is known. Miller’s two sons worked under him; one, Charles, became the first head of the Cambridge Botanic Garden. (Wikipedia)

• Keywords: Botany · Garden History · Herbal Healing · Herbals · History of Botany · History of Medicinal Plants · Medical Plants · Medicinal Plants · Natural History · Plants · Plants and Gardens · Plants of Medicine · Verney Naylor Collection
• Language: English
• Inventory Number: 31403AB

EUR 780,-- 

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