The Barber-Surgeons' Garden
Finding respite - and inspiration - in a medicinal herb garden
Seven hundred years ago, English barbers performed surgeries as well as cutting hair. Between snips and shaves, a barber could lance your boil, let your blood, or pull your teeth. Apparently this is because the practices required similar sets of skills and tools. I can see the point about shared expertise. Barbers and surgeons both need manual dexterity, and a certain ease in working with other people’s bodies. Perhaps there’s a shared appreciation of cosmetic orderliness, too: perfectly cross-hatched stitches and plaits tied up with bows. The common tools are harder to imagine. Neither an amputation with a dainty set of fringe-snippers nor a short-back-and-sides with a bone-saw seem appealing.*
Whatever the reason, the trimmers, croppers, slicers and severers of the City of London got along well enough that, in 1540, they merged their respective trade guilds into a new Company of Barbers and Surgeons. Over time, as with many of the City guilds, the association between the company and the trade itself faded. And, as with many of the City’s buildings, the Barber-Surgeons’ grand halls were wrecked by the Great Fire and the Blitz. Still, on the edge of the gardens of the Barbican estate, a 1969 rebuilding of the Barber-Surgeons’ hall stands. Round the back, at the bottom of a little lawn which can be gotten into through a hedge gap halfway down a car-park ramp, there is a meticulously manicured garden. Miniature gravel paths run through labelled segments of soil, circling a diminutive but self-satisfied olive tree at the centre. A semi-circle of ruined brick—one of the 13th-century fortifications to the City’s Roman wall, after which the Barbican is named—now looks after the plants, acting as a sun-trap and wind-break.
In early summer, at the height (or maybe in the depths) of lockdown, I made the garden a stop on my once-daily walk. The appeal of it wasn’t so much that it was quiet. Everywhere was quiet, that was the problem. I went there because it was about the only place that was still riotously, clamorously busy. The plants jostled and swelled, overrunning their allotted patches and scrummaging one another. Lurid flowers sprung up to titillate passing bees, who had obviously ignored instructions to avoid commuting into central London. Each change in the breeze brought a fresh scent from a different corner of the garden: aniseed, jasmine, and a rich under-note of deep green grass-rot. It was only on my third or fourth visit that I read the plaque: “JOHN GERARD 1545-1612,” it read:
John Gerard was a surgeon, horticulturist and botanist. He was the master of the Barber-Surgeon’s Company in 1607. He had a wide knowledge of medicinal plants. His famous “Herball or General Historie of Plants” of 1597 which described over 1700 plants is still acclaimed today. Gerard was Surgeon and Herbarist to King James I. There was a garden at the hall in 1555, but the first mention of a Herb Garden as such was the garden made by Gerard in 1597.
Medieval London would have been full of gardens like this, given their importance for sustaining the wealthy households of the religious and political elites based in the city. They weren’t used for growing a staple diet, which mostly consisted of bread, meat and ale. Instead, they provided frivolous luxuries: fruit trees, grape vines, beehives, flowers, and medicinal herbs. In the 1600s, as London’s population grew and the dense, ramshackle housing that would serve as tinder for the Great Fire sprung up between the bigger houses, the gardens began to disappear (a few were used for bowling alleys, a popular 17th-century recreation). The gardens of livery companies like the Barber-Surgeons bucked this trend. The first surviving reference to their garden is from 1597, in a proposal that a plot of land should be set aside “fit to make a garden for to plant all kind of herbes in root plants and such like as to the said Mr Gerard being a skilful Herbalist should think meet of for the Worship of this society.”
I hadn’t read Gerard’s Herball, but in March, for work, I’d been reading The Gardener’s Labyrinth, a 1577 sequel to the first wildly popular gardening manual by Thomas Hill (probably England’s earliest celebrity horticulturist). It was strange jolt to realise that the plants that Hill and Gerard had catalogued and described were here, living and dying and stinking and rotting: feverfew, hyssop, nettle, marigold, elderflower. I’d read about them in early modern botanical books, handled in libraries under strenuously regulated conditions of temperature, humidity, and security. Here, the real things were punching up through paving and brickwork. As I walked around the garden, I’d run my fingers along the leaves, sometimes kneeling to catch the scent. I regretted this later, when I looked up the garden’s website:
Please be aware that most plants are poisonous in one form or another with very few exceptions. Plant chemicals, even ones that can be made into medicines, have mainly evolved to deter passing herbivorous and insectivorous predators from the dinosaurs onwards. Please do not try to eat or smoke any parts of the plants in the Garden and some are risky even to touch without adequate protection.
At least I hadn’t smoked anything. Actually, I felt better for being in the garden. Presumably in some past plague, it would have been busy with physicians, muttering and picking, sniffing and conferring. It was empty now, but it was helping me, at least. I started looking up the names on the labels when I got home. Some I knew: parsley, liquorice, lavender. Others I didn’t recognise: stonecrop, meadowsweet, cushion spurge. They all had their own histories: medical, literary, artistic, occult, culinary. More than that, they time-travelled, cropping up in 16th-century recipe books, and then in 19th-century heraldry guides, and then in 1980s homeopathy manuals, and then in articles about which vitamins might fortify my immune system against Covid. And yet, for all that the plants were scattered across my browser tabs, they were also under my fingernails, and in stray fibres caught on my clothes. At the start of the pandemic, like many of us, I had sought to understand what was happening through literary and historical precedent. But this was a different kind of evidence of medical history: embodied, sensory, and alive. It’s that sort of evidence which The Physic Garden seeks to document and interpret—starting, next time, with Feverfew.
* In any case, the real rationale was probably financial. On the same basis, on top of everything else, the really enterprising barbers would supposedly offer sexual services, offering to connect clients with local sex workers. For more on that, should you be interested,, I recommend Mark Albert Johnston, ‘“To What Bawdy House Doth Your Maister Belong?”: Barbers, Bawds, and Vice in the Early Modern London Barbershop’ in Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschell (eds), Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650 ( Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010)