The plan on which the herbalist lays out his letterpress is methodical in the extreme.  He begins by describing his plant, then gives its habitat, then discusses its nomenclature, and ends with a medical account of its nature and virtues.  It is, of course, to be expected that we should find the line old names of plants enshrined in Gerard’s pages.  For instance, he gives to the deadly nightshade the name, which now only lingers in a corner of Devonshire, the “dwale.”  As an instance of his style, I may quote a passage from what he has to say about the virtues, or rather vices, of this plant: 

“Banish it from your gardens and the use of it also, being a plant so furious and deadly; for it bringeth such as have eaten thereof into a dead sleep wherein many have died, as hath been often seen and proved by experience both in England and elsewhere.  But to give you an example hereof it shall not be amiss.  It came to pass that three boys of Wisbeach, in the Isle of Ely, did eat of the pleasant and beautiful fruit hereof, two whereof died in less than eight hours after they had eaten of them.  The third child had a quantity of honey and water mixed together given him to drink, causing him to vomit often.  God blessed this means, and the child recovered.  Banish, therefore, these pernicious plants out of your gardens, and all places near to your houses where children do resort.”

Gerard has continually to stop his description that he may repeat to his readers some anecdote which he remembers.  Now it is how “Master Cartwright, a gentleman of Gray’s Inn, who was grievously wounded into the lungs,” was cured with the herb called “Saracen’s Compound,” “and that, by God’s permission, in short space.”  Now it is to tell us that he has found yellow archangel growing under a sequestered hedge “on the left hand as you go from the village of Hampstead, near London, to the church,” or that “this amiable and pleasant kind of primrose” (a sort of oxlip) was first brought to light by Mr. Hesketh, “a diligent searcher after simples,” in a Yorkshire wood.  While the groundlings were crowding to see new plays by Shirley and Massinger, the editor of this volume was examining fresh varieties of auricula in “the gardens of Mr. Tradescant and Mr. Tuggie.”  It is wonderful how modern the latter statement sounds, and how ancient the former.  But the garden seems the one spot on earth where history does not assert itself, and, no doubt, when Nero was fiddling over the blaze of Rome, there were florists counting the petals of rival roses at Paestum as peacefully and conscientiously as any gardeners of to-day.