Illustrations by Karl Simmons

Artist Karl Simmons, a garden volunteer since 2018, creates beautiful work focussing on different aspects of the RCP garden of medicinal plants.

This A4 landscape calendar showcases his project to record the eight gardens at St Andrews Place known as the Pharmacopoea Londinensis beds. The plants growing here were all authorised for use as medicines by the college in May 1618, when it published its very first pharmacopoea. Physicians could only prescribe, and apothecaries could only dispense, the medicines listed in this legally binding Latin text.

These gardens were created by head gardener Jane Knowles in 2007. Her original research involved identifying the plants named in the pharmacopoea by translating them from 17th-century Latin into current scientific botanical binomials. She did this using the RCP’s magnificent collection of early herbals, most notably Nicholas Culpeper’s A Physicall Directory (1649), his English translation of the college’s text to which he added further information on uses and preparation. This was to form the basis of his famous Herbal.

The calendar features wonderful illustrations of the whole beds as well as detailed coloured illustrations of the individual plants growing within those beds.

The garden itself can be visited throughout the year- see back of calendar for details.