'Still to tend plant, herb and flour': Horticulture and botany in the poetry of John Milton

The purpose of this dissertation is to bring seventeenth-century botanical information to bear on every plant and tree that Milton mentions in his poetic works, excluding his Psalm translations. Specifically, I wish to explain why Milton included particular plants; I wish to offer insight on how Milton's contemporary readers might have interpreted his use of the flora; and I wish to identify each plant as specifically as possible in modern botanical terms.;The bulk of this dissertation is an annotated catalog of all the plants Milton mentions in his poetry. I have arranged these plants in alphabetical order, based the plant name Milton uses. Each entry includes three distinct sections: the first includes quotations of all the occurrences of the plant at hand and English translations of Latin quotations; the second identifies the plant as specifically as possible, usually with a modern Latin binomial; and the third section is a discussion of Milton's use(s) of the plant, with more emphasis on botanical information and less on Milton's literary antecedents.;For my primary sources, I relied mainly on three major seventeenth-century botanical works: John Gerard's Herbal (revised 1633), John Parkinson's A Garden of Pleasant Flowers (1629), and Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum (1640). I also consulted a number of different botanical writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including John Maplet, William Turner, Nicholas Culpeper, William Coles, and John Evelyn, as well as Pliny the Elder, whose Natural History was read widely both in Latin and in an English translation of 1601 by Philemon Holland.;Milton includes more than seventy-five varieties of plants and trees in his poetry. In his early major poetry, I have found a concentration of native English plants, while in his later poems, Milton relies more on exotic flora. In general, Milton is precise when he refers to plants, yet he is usually less interested in botanical details than in the various levels of meaning that he can evoke with the flora.