ABSTRACT
In the early 1720s, Peter Aram began writing what would become APractical Treatise of Flowers. As its title suggests, Aram's Treatise is less concerned with providing scientific descriptions than it is with rendering the 'more essential Knowledge' of growing and cultivating flowers. Aram was work on Studley-Park at this time, as the same commonplace book includes his own, suitably eighteenth-century title for the poem: 'Mirum Naturæ or A Plan of Studley Park Nigh Rippon in Yorkshire Together with all its Rarities & uncommon Curiosities'. Studley-Park, complete with Aram's lengthy historical notes, appeared prominently in Gent's The Antient and Modern History of the Loyal Town of Rippon. Studley-Park certainly owes a debt to the topographical tradition popularized in the seventeenth century by John Denham and Edmund Waller, and revived later by Pope and others but remains the most ambitious and successful example of the kind by a plebeian pen in the first half of the eighteenth century.
