Paradisi in sole Paradisus Terrestris. Or A Garden of all sorts of pleasant flowers which our English ayre will permitt to be noursed up: with A Kitchen garden of all manner of herbes, rootes, & fruites, for meate or sause used with us, and An Orchard of all sorte of fruit-bearing Trees and Shrubbes fit for our Land together With the right orderinge planting & preserving of them and their uses & vertues. PARKINSON, John.

First edition of "the earliest important treatise on horticulture published in England" (Henrey, p. 79). The book, with its wittily punning Latin title "Park-in-sun's Earthly Paradise", contains descriptions of almost 1,000 plants from the garden ofthe botanist John Parkinson (1567-1650), the apothecary to James I. The ornate title page features a woodcut of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden amongst numerous different plants, and the work is dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, for which Charles I gave Parkinson the title of "botanicus regius primarius". In this copy, quire A is in the first setting with line 4 of the heading on A1r ending "amend". Provenance: a) William Huggins (d. 1761), of Heath House, Hampshire, with his armorial bookplate on the title page verso. Huggins was a translator, and close friend of William Hogarth, a fellow member of the Academy of Ancient Music. Huggins's unpublished translation of the Divine Comedy would have been the first into English, but the manuscript was lost after his death; b) Dr Paul Jay Bowman (1893-1985) of Fort Bragg, California, with his bookplate depicting the "Rhododendron Ruby Bowman", which he hybridized in 1941 and named after his wife. Bowman was a keen horticulturist who pioneered the breeding of Californian rhododendrons and amassed a large collection of specimens. Henrey I, pp. 161-7; Hunt I, 215; Plesch 356; STC 19300. Folio (330 x 210 mm), pp. [xii], 612, [16]. Wood-engraved title page, woodcut portrait of the author, more than 100 full-page woodcuts by Switzer, mostly after Clusius and Lobel, of plants and garden plans, headpieces and initials. Late 17th-century panelled calf, rebacked and recornered to style, red calf label, floriate sprig blind-stamped to compartments, raised bands, board edges tooled in gilt, red sprinkled edges. Occasional early pen trials and pencil annotations. Extremities worn, covers stripped and scratched in places, contents generally clean, some marginal damp stain and worming, heaviest at beginning and end, minor loss to a few lower outer corners: a very good copy.