A first edition of the first Canadian Flora, Canadensium plantarum by Jacques Phillippe Cornut is available in Sokol Books’s latest catalogue valued at £12,500.  The book is the first North American herbals.  Cornut, a French physician, never visited North America but received the majority of his plant specimens from the Robins family, who supervised the gardens of Henry IV as well as many others.  Over thirty species from eastern North America are described and illustrated for the first time.

Another first edition is available priced at £4,250.  This one by Giovanni Battista Ferrari is entitled De Florum Cultura libri IV.  This treatise on floriculture is illustrated with botanical engravings by Anna Maria Vaiani and allegorical scenes from drawings by Pietro de Cortona, Guido Reni, and Andrea Sacchi and engraved by Johann Friedrich Greuter and Claude Mellan.  One chapter which is particularly well illustrated is of flower arrangements in 17th century Rome.

There are several books of interest referring to herbals.  One, Grete Herbal by Peter Treveris, dated 1526, is for sale at £12,500.  The book contains remedies for everything from melancholy to baldness, invoking God and the Virgin Mary alongside Diana and the Centaurs.  It is utilitarian in its approach and designed to be accessible to a relatively broad public – the book is written in English rather than Latin.

Greate Herbal by John Kynge is the last of the early editions of the Great Herbal and is corrected with improved layout, spelling and orthography for the Elizabethan reader.  Strangely bathing is considered a strange ‘fad’ and drinking water seems to be thought equally pernicious.  This book is valued at £37,500.

Le Grand Herbier by Alain Lotrain, priced at £17,500 is a rare and early edition.  The cataloguer believes that there are probably only three earlier editions.  The work is essentially a pharmacopeia and designed for remedial use by country doctors, practical apothecaries and laymen.

A superbly illustrated botanical work and possibly one of the first is Specimen Historiae Plantarum by Paul de Renaulme is valued at £3,750.  The work is of particular interest for the quality of its etchings.  “The illustrations are extraordinary for the date: finely detailed naturalistic studies that recall Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues.  Each plate shows the whole plant but with additional studies of variant forms.  Of particular interest is the section on the tobacco plant.