Treasures of the Bodleian

The White Date, ‘ripe August 29’, is one of a sequence of 66 watercolours of garden fruits, captioned and arranged by dates of ripening throughout the year, and often accompanied by charming depictions of fauna. Captions on other pages refer to John Tradescant the Elder (d. 1638), a royal gardener whose activities in collecting and growing fruit-trees must at least have inspired the present volume. The pictures were rebound (and cropped) for Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), and may have been acquired by him amongst the ‘rarities’ of the Tradescant family which came to form the core of his own donations to Oxford University.