Item is the second edition of a botany book written by John Gerarde and illustrated by John Payne. The second edition was enlarged and amended by Thomas Johnson. The first edition was written in 1597 and was re-printed several times because of its widespread popularity. Item contains descriptions of the characteristics, growing conditions, and uses of plants alongside over 2700 woodcut illustrations. The work is divided into three books:
Book 1: Containing grasses, rushes, reeds, cones, flags, and bulbous or onion-rooted plantes
Book 2: Containing the description, place, time, names, nature, and vertues of all sorts of herbs, for meat, medicine, or sweet-smelling use, & c.
Book 3: Containing the description, place, time, names, nature, and vertues of trees, shrubs, bushes, fruit-bearing plants, rosins, gums, roses, heath, mosses, some Indian plants, and other rare plants not remembered in Proeme to the first book. Also mushrooms, corall, and their seurall kindes, & c.