Edith Grey Wheelwright

Any reader, finding that Miss Wheelwright was a noted authority on herbs, might quite reasonably come to this book expecting to learn a good deal about the history of their cultivation, not least about the subject of the title, the physick garden. They would, as I was, be bitterly disappointed.

Edith Grey Wherlwright has the unhappy talent of writing a great deal while conveying very little. We are more than halfway through the book before she tears herself from vague and often opinionated musings about the distant past of medicine in general before the topic of the physick garden is raised - and in a blink it is gone.

Nor is she any more thorough when it comes to that physick garden on paper, the herbal. Despite the promises of the contents page, the topic is barely skated over. Many of the important herbals of continental Europe are either referred to only in passing, or barely mentioned - Lonicer does not get a look-in - and she is not much better when it comes to the English examples. Gerard is a plagiarist, Parkinson just a gardener, Culpeper worth only a passing sneer. Tradescant merits less than half a paragraph, and though she tells us that a Physick Garden was planted in Moscow in 1665, she says nothing more, nor does she explain the significance of this to the elder Tradescant’s career. Later herbals such as that of Sir John Hill aren’t mentioned.

The only earlier herbalist whom she feels is worth more than a passing mention is Thomas Sydenham. He merits almost two pages, before she digresses onto the “morbid ideas” of the seventeenth century.

Sadly, Miss Wheelwright is much infected with the racialist ideology of the period (the 1930s), and is inclined to stop the reader in their tracks with asides about the “black races” as sources of disease, or “racial suicide”. These do not seem to be rooted in any particular beliefs, so much as trotted out to please the reader.

At page 161, having learnt very little, we are plunged into a genus-by-genus romp through British native herbs, leading us up to Chapter 9: “Cultivation in England: the drug plants of the British Empire”. Under this heading we are surprised to find some actual gist. In fact, in these twenty five pages is more than 90% of what the book is worth reading for. And then, for the last chapter in which she describes the state of science - a description which is inevitably now extremely dated, we are back to lofty sentiment and waffle.

You may think I have been unnecessarily rude about this book. Not unnecessarily. Despite the fact that Jonathan Cape felt it was worth reissuing as part of its Life and Letters series, it lacks either charm of writing or wealth of content. The illustrations are as poor, irrelevant and unilluminating as the text.… (mais)