CHARLES DE L'ESCLUSE D'ARRAS - Le propagateur de la Pomme de Terre au XVIe siècle. Sa biographie et sa correspondance

Amsterdam & London: Landré et Meesters & Kew Books. Fine. 1976. Facsimile. Stiff Wrappers. 110 pages; Fine in publisher's printed wrappers. A facsimile reprint limited to 250 copies published by Kew Books and Landre & Meesters of the original 1899 edition, published by J. Rothschild in Paris -- which itself had been limited to 250 copies. The subject, Charles de l'Écluse, sometimes known by his Latin name Carolus Clusius, was born in Arras in 1526. He is often thought of as the most influential of all 16th-century scientific horticulturists. Clusius was employed by the Fugger banking family in the 1560's as tutor to one of Anton Fugger's sons. He also functioned as an agent for the powerful Fugger interests, including a plant collecting expedition to Spain, where he became familiar with plants introduced from the New World. In 1573, he became Director of the imperial medical garden in Vienna, appointed by Emperor Maximilian II. After leaving Vienna Clusius accepted an appointment as professor at the University of Leiden in October 1593, where he also became the first praefectus of Leiden's new botanical garden, the Hortus Academicus. This is often considered one of the earliest formal botanical gardens of Europe. Clusius touched on many subjects, introduced many now-familiar plants to Europe including the tulip, the horse chestnut, and, of course, the potato as richly detailed here. This text also reconciles Clusius' work on the potato with the eighteenth century's great potato advocate: Antoine-Augustin Parmentier . Clusius is also quite well known as an early cultivator and describer of the tulip bulp and its flowers. His pioneering observations on tulip bulb's "breaking" -- which led to the colorful "flames and feathers" in the flowers caused a mania never before seen in European social and economic circles, about 400 years ago. The 1899 edition reprinted here is now quite scarce -- [see OCLC Number: 1179194562 which locates 3 copies only, or 2, if the two citations in Denmark describe the same copy]. For our 1976 reprint, see OCLC Number: 1069277217.; .