A page of watercolours of seven spring plants including: three hyacinths (Hyacinthus orientalis L.), a Persian iris (Iris persica L.), two Spanish daffodils, (Narcissus hispanicus Gouan), and a purple crocus (Crocus vernus Hill). Hyacinths were introduced to England from the eastern Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century. These plants had fewer flowers than the varieties cultivated today. By 1600 daffodils were already popular garden flowers, said by John Gerard, author of the famous Herball (1597), to ‘decke up our London gardens’. The species illustrated here is the origin of the yellow trumpet varieties which are now naturalised in some areas of Britain.

Alexander Marshal was a talented horticulturalist, entomologist and amateur artist. He was one of a network of gardeners working in and around London in the middle of the seventeenth century, and had links with the Tradescants (who had a garden at Lambeth) and Henry Compton (who, as Bishop of London, developed a fine garden at Fulham Palace). Marshal’s careful study of plants was combined with an examination of the science of painting and he wrote in 1667 to the Secretary of the Royal Society to discuss the methods he used for making pigments: ‘I thought Seven years agon [ago], that I Knew much, but I find, that practice shows me daily more than I Knew before…. the Searche of Colours has Cost me much time in finding out, and to know, which would hold Colour in water, and mixe well, else I had not used them in my booke, and am shure will bee as fresh a hundred years hence, as when you Saw them Last.’ The colours in Marshal’s paintings do indeed remain impressively bright over 350 years later.