Everything about John Tradescant The Elder totally explained
John Tradescant the elder (c.
1570s – 15/16 April,
1638), father of
John Tradescant the younger, was an English naturalist, gardener, collector and traveller, probably born in Suffolk, England. He began his career as head gardener to the
Earl of Salisbury at
Hatfield House, who initiated Tradescant in travelling by sending him to the
Low Countries for fruit trees in 1610/11. He was kept on by Robert's son
William, to produce gardens at the family's London house,
Salisbury House. He then designed gardens on the site of
St Augustine's Abbey for Edward Lord Wotton in 1615-23.
Later, Tradescant was gardener to the royal favorite
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, remodelling his gardens at
New Hall, Essex and at
Burley-on-the-Hill. John Tradescant travelled to the
Nikolo-Korelsky Monastery in Arctic
Russia in 1618 (his own account of the expedition survives in his collection), to the
Levant and to
Algiers during an expedition against the
Barbary pirates in 1620, returned to the Low Countries on Buckingham's behalf in 1624, and finally went to
Paris and (as an engineer for the ill-fated siege of
La Rochelle) the
Ile de Rhé with Buckingham. After Buckingham's assassination in 1628, he was then snapped up in 1630 by
the king to be Keeper of his Majesty's Gardens, Vines, and Silkworms at his queen's minor palace,
Oatlands Palace in Surrey.
On all his trips he collected seeds and bulbs everywhere and assembling a collection of curiosities of natural history and ethnography housed in a large house, "The Ark," in Lambeth, London. The Ark was the prototypical "
Cabinet of Curiosity"
(External Link
), a collection of rare and strange objects, that became the first
museum open to the public in England, the
Musaeum Tradescantianum. He also gathered specimens through American colonists, including his personal friend
John Smith, who bequeathed Tradescant a quarter of his library. From their
botanical garden in
Lambeth, on the south bank of the
Thames, he and his son,
John, introduced many plants into English gardens that have become part of the modern gardener's repertory. A genus of plants (
Tradescantia) is named to honour him. Tradescant Road, off South Lambeth Road in Vauxhall, marks the former boundary of the Tradescant estate.
He was buried in the churchyard of St-Mary-at-Lambeth, as was his son, which is now established as the
Museum of Garden History.
He is the subject of the novel by
Philippa Gregory,
Earthly Joys.
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