![]() The conflict between king and Parliament was supposed to end with one big battle at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. For royalists like Reresby, those who took up arms against the king were taking on God. The world turned upside down was a popular conceit in the 1640s. One is headed ‘The Postures of the Musket’. At the end of the decade Reresby turned his notebook upside down and began a different set of lists. It is impossible not to feel a vicarious pride in his list of ‘my best Tulipas’. According to his son, Reresby was ‘exactly curious in his garden and was one of the first that acquented that part of England (soe far north) with the exactness and nicety of thos things’. Every peach, pear and plum is catalogued, as are herbs, shrubs, bulbs – ‘Kentish Codlings’, ‘the Granado Gilliflower’, ‘Melincholly Munkes hoode’ – and attempts at grafting and inarching. This was the year a local gentleman, Sir John Reresby of Thrybergh Hall, began to note the contents of his garden. I n the Leeds branch of the West Yorkshire Archive Service, there is a long, narrow notebook with a vellum cover which shows signs of water damage and has peeled away at the top so that it’s possible to make out some of the words on the first page – ‘apricocks’, ‘plombes’ – and a date: 1633. ![]()
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