Why it matters

Louis XIV could command armies and architects, but he couldn’t command the seasons, so he hired a lawyer who could. Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie had abandoned the courts for gardening, worked for Fouquet, Condé and Colbert, and in 1670 was put in charge of every royal fruit and vegetable garden. At Versailles he took a swamp, drained it, carted in better soil, and walled it into a grid of sheltered chambers, each with its own microclimate. The result was the Potager du Roi, which still exists: asparagus in December, strawberries in March, peas in April, and figs in June for a king who adored them. La Quintinie died in 1688, and his son published this, his life’s method, two years later. It became the standard work on fruit and kitchen gardening across Europe. John Evelyn translated it into English, and Amsterdam printers pirated it almost at once. This copy is a first edition in contemporary calf, and its early owner Regnault added a page of his own: a recipe for the tar used to seal grafts. That makes it a royal manual put to use by someone who actually grafted trees. This summation of his practice was published posthumously in 1690 under the supervision of his son Michel. It was pirated in Amsterdam within two years and translated into English in 1693, and its chapters on pruning, grafting and forcing fruit out of season shaped European kitchen-garden practice for a century.

Why we're looking

A complete-looking first edition in untouched contemporary speckled calf with a named 17th-century owner who wrote his own grafting-tar recipe into the back of vol. 1. On relative value it does not look cheap — a complete first edition in contemporary mottled calf is offered by GardenHistory.com at £3,500, roughly half this ask at prevailing rates, and a worn contemporary-basane copy hammered at €500 at Gros & Delettrez, so the premium being asked rests on binding, condition and provenance.

Watch out for

The seller states damp marks and foxing without saying where they fall, so ask specifically whether the double-page and folding plates (the Potager du Roi plan among them) are affected or repaired. The stated plate complement — portrait plus 2 plates in vol. 1 and 11 in vol. 2 — matches another recorded 1690 first edition offered at auction, which is reassuring on completeness, but request images of each plate rather than relying on the count. The odd pagination of vol. 2 (180, then 179-566) is as the seller describes it; worth confirming with them that it reflects the original misnumbering rather than a made-up or sophisticated copy.