John Tradescant the Elder (portrait attributed to Cornelis de Neve
Born
1570s
Suffolk
Died
15–16 April 1638
Nationality
English
Occupation(s)
Naturalist, gardener, collector and traveller
John Tradescant the Elder (/trəˈdɛskənt/; c. 1570s – 15–16 April 1638), father of John Tradescant the Younger, was an English naturalist, gardener, collector and traveller. On 18 June 1607 he married Elizabeth Day of Meopham in Kent, England. She had been baptised on 22 August 1586 and was the daughter of Jeames Day, a Vicar, also of Meopham.
In 1623, Tradescant became gardener to the royal favourite George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, remodelling his gardens at New Hall, Essex and at Burley-on-the-Hill.[1]
He 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 Île de Ré with Buckingham.
After Buckingham's assassination in 1628, he was engaged in 1630 by King Charles I 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, from which he assembled a collection of curiosities of natural history and ethnography which he housed in a large house, "The Ark", in Lambeth, London.[1]
The Ark was the prototypical "Cabinet of Curiosity", a collection of rare and strange objects, that became the first museum open to the public in England, the Musaeum Tradescantianum.
He 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 Tradescant the younger, introduced many plants into English gardens that have become part of the modern gardener's repertory.
He is buried in the churchyard of St-Mary-at-Lambeth, as is his son.[2] The churchyard is now established as the Garden Museum.[3]