Below is the complete list of Philippa Gregory’s Tradescant books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Tradescant Books
About Tradescant
Philippa Gregory’s Tradescant series is a two-book historical saga centered on the real-life gardeners and plant collectors John Tradescant the Elder and John Tradescant the Younger. The novels, Earthly Joys and Virgin Earth, move through the first half of the seventeenth century, using gardening, exploration, court politics, religious conflict, and colonial expansion to examine a family whose work brought them into contact with some of the most powerful people of the Stuart age.
Earthly Joys follows John Tradescant the Elder, whose skill as a gardener and collector takes him from service in aristocratic households into the orbit of King James I and later Charles I. His professional life depends on patronage, which means that gardening can never be separated entirely from politics. Estates, royal gardens, imported plants, and ambitious patrons all reflect a world in which beauty, prestige, and power are closely connected.
Gregory uses Tradescant’s profession to open a perspective on the period quite different from conventional court-centered historical fiction. Plants arrive in England through increasingly global networks of trade and exploration, and collecting them requires travel, money, contacts, and access to distant places. The garden therefore becomes a record of England’s expanding reach as well as a private expression of taste.
The relationship between Tradescant and his patrons also gives the first novel much of its tension. Personal loyalty can become dangerous when political alliances shift, particularly as conflict between the monarchy and Parliament intensifies. Tradescant may think of himself primarily as a gardener, but serving powerful men means that their fortunes inevitably affect his own.
Virgin Earth moves the focus to John Tradescant the Younger. His life expands the family story beyond England, particularly through travel to the American colonies. The younger Tradescant inherits both his father’s passion for plants and the complicated relationship between professional ambition and political upheaval.
The second novel gives Gregory a wider canvas. Colonial Virginia introduces different landscapes, peoples, and systems of power, while events in England move toward civil war. The Tradescants’ collecting activities connect these worlds, but Gregory also examines the cost of expansion. Plants and knowledge can be exchanged across continents, yet those exchanges occur within systems shaped by conquest, settlement, trade, and profound inequality.
The English Civil War becomes increasingly important as the series progresses. Royalists and Parliamentarians divide communities and families, and the Tradescants are forced to navigate loyalties that cannot remain purely private. The upheaval also changes the meaning of patronage, property, and social advancement in ways that affect the family directly.
John Tradescant the Younger’s relationship with Elias Ashmole is another historically significant element. The Tradescant collection, eventually associated with Ashmole, helped form the basis of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. Gregory uses this history to explore questions of ownership, legacy, and what happens when a lifetime’s work passes into someone else’s hands.
The two books are best read in publication order because Virgin Earth directly develops the family history established in Earthly Joys. The generational shift is essential: the elder Tradescant builds a life through service and collecting, while the younger inherits both the opportunities and the unresolved consequences of that world.
The Tradescant series stands apart from Gregory’s royal sagas because its protagonists are not monarchs or queens. Their access to power comes through expertise. By following gardeners rather than rulers, Gregory shows the Stuart period from the perspective of men whose work moved between court, commerce, science, travel, and empire, making plants themselves part of a much larger story about ambition and historical change.