Le Jardin du Roy Tres Chrestien Henry IV. Roy de France et de Navare dedié a la Royne.

Paris, 1608.. FIRST EDITION. Folio. (34 x 22 cm). Contemporary brown calf with raised bands, gilt titles, ruling and tooling to spine. Speckled edges. Description affixed to front paste-down. Portrait frontispiece of Joannes Robin, engraved architectural title-page with portraits of C. Celse and M. Lobel and an illustration of the Jardin du Plantes in Paris, and 47 (of 73) full-page copper engraved botanical plates. Also lacking the portrit of Vallet. Paginated 1 to 49 in old manuscript ink. Binding rubbed with loss to upper and lower covers. Spine worn with some loss at head and foot. Title label to spine cracked with some loss. Some discolouration from glued boards to end papers, intermittent light spotting throughout, dampstain towards outer vertical margin in some seventeen later leaves. Vallet's work -- 'The first important florilegium ... a work of great beauty (Blunt and Stearn, p. 101) -- first appeared as Le Jardin du roy tres chrestien Henry IV in 1608 with 73 plates, and was followed by a second edition, re-titled Le Jardin du roy tres chrestien Loys XIII in 1623 with 90 plates, and a third edition with 93 plates in 1633. Vallet's love of botany and his friendship with Jean Robin (creator of the royal gardens at the Louvre for Henri IV in about 1590), stimulated his work on the Jardin du Roy, and Vallet pays tribute to his friend by including his portrait in the work and by documenting some of the exotic species brought back by Robin from Spain and Guinea for the royal garden. Marie de Médicis, consort of Henri IV and the book's dedicatee, was to have taken particular pleasure in these rarities, and she also made fashionable the floral motif in embroidery; preliminary verses referring to Vallet's work in silk or gold make clear that the illustrations were also intended to serve as embroidery patterns. (Dunthorne, p. 253; Hunt 187; Nissen BBI 2039)