The family of the Tradescants is involved in considerable obscurity, and the period of the arrival of the first of that name in England is not, for a certainty, known. There were, it seems, three of the Tradescants at one time in this country--grandfather, father, and son. John Tradescant (or Tradeskin, as he was generally called by his contemporaries) the elder was, according to Anthony Wood, a Fleming or a Dutchman. He probably came to England about the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth, or in the beginning of that of James the First. He is reported to have been a great traveller, and to have previously visited Barbary, Greece, Egypt, and other Eastern countries. Upon his first arrival here he is said to have been successively gardener to the Lord Treasurer Salisbury, Lord Weston, the Duke of Buckingham, and other noblemen of distinction. In these situations he remained until the office of royal gardener was bestowed upon him in 1629. To John Tradescant the elder, posterity is mainly indebted for the introduction of botany in this kingdom. "He, by great industry, made it manifest that there is scarcely any plant existing in the known world, that will not, with proper care, thrive in our climate." In a visit made by Sir W. Watson and Dr. Mitchell to Tradescant's garden in 1749, an account of which is inserted in the _Philosophical Transactions_, vol. xlvi. p. 160., it appears that it had been many years totally neglected, and the house belonging to it empty and ruined; but though the garden was quite covered with weeds, there remained among them manifest footsteps of its founder. They found there the _Borago latifolia sempervivens_ of Caspar Bauhine; _Polygonatum vulgare latifolium_, C.B.; _Aristolochia clematitis recta_, C.B.; and the _Dracontium_ of Dodoens. There were then remaining two trees of the _Arbutus_, which from their being so long used to our winters, did not suffer from the severe cold of 1739-40, when most of their kind were killed in England. In the orchard there was a tree of the _Rhamnus catharticus_, about twenty feet high, and nearly a foot in diameter. There are at present no traces of this garden remaining. In the Ashmolean Library is preserved (No. 1461.) a folio manuscript (probably in the handwriting of the elder Tradescant) which purports to be "The Tradescants' Orchard, illustrated in sixty-five coloured drawings of fruits, exhibiting various kinds of the apple, cherry, damson, date, {354} gooseberry, peares, peaches, plums, nectarines, grape, Hasell-nutt, quince, strawberry, with the times of their ripening."