Ciues or chiues [chives]

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Few garden plants have a more ordinary place in the kitchen than chives, and this line engraving shows the slender, onion-scented herb as English readers would have met it in print. It appears on page 139 of John Gerarde's *The Herball*, the illustrated plant book first published in London in 1597, which described plants and their uses for an English audience and drew heavily on continental herbals. The record gives no date for this impression, so it is best read as a window onto how Renaissance herbals presented common culinary plants: as useful, sometimes medicinal, and worth identifying on the page. The caption card also tags the image under herbs, flowers and vegetables, a reminder that those categories overlapped in early botanical books.

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