Limited Edition (1500 copies)

About this volume: WALAHFRID STRABO. Hortulus. Hunt Botanical Library, Pittsburgh, Pa., 1966.  Walahfrid, who once with typical frankness described himself as the person " with the squint ", hence his sobriquet Strabo, was Abbot of Reichenau on Lake Constance eleven centuries ago. Although a pious monk and a classical scholar, it is as a devoted gardener that he is remembered today. In the seclusion of his monastic garden lie composed in Latin hexameters twenty-seven short poems in praise of gardening. A later scribe gave them the collective title of Hortulus, or little garden. Strabo was a down-to-earth gardener for whom the sumrnum malum in secular matters was the nettle. " Y set to work with my mattock and dug up the sluggish ground. From their embraces I tore those nettles though they grew and grew again." Gardens of his time were essentially for the use of the kitchen, and his descriptions of plants deal mainly with their medicinal and culinary properties. But Strabo was not insensitive to their shape and colour ; witness his graphic description of gourds : " They hang on a slender stalk and swell from a long, thin neck into huge bodies, their great mass broadening at the flanks. They are all belly, all paunch." And his sound practical advice is compounded with a sly humour. " If ever a vicious stepmother mixes in your drink subtle poisons, or makes a treacherous dish of lethal aconite for you, don't waste a moment—take a dose of wholesome horehound [Marrubium vulgare L.]; that will counteract the danger you suspect." The Hunt Library have published a new translation in free verse by Raef Payne of the Hortulus, with a facsimile copy of the elegant Caroline minuscules of the St. Gall manuscript now in the Vatican Library (Codex Latinus bibliotheca regia no. 469), the earliest extant transcription, produced shortly after Strabo's death in A.D. 849. Wilfred Blunt supplies a brief life of the Benedictine monk, and Dr George Lawrence adds a bibliographical study of earlier editions of the Hortulus. Green linoleum cuts of plants by Henry Evans superimpose a delicate calligraphic pattern over the text of the poems. Scholarship and impeccable taste in book production have been consummated in yet another Hunt Library publication. R.G. C.D.

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