In 1675, Hugh Platt's 'newly reprinted' gardening book received a glowing review in the oldest English scientific journal. First published in 1608 as Florae s Paradise, Platt's book had reappeared in 1652. The 1675 edition was its seventh reprint. That year's review of Platt's works in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London outlined the author's broadranging contributions and commented: 'But above all, he advanced the Agriculture of England by Marle, Saline materials, as far as the Seas extend, which encompass these Islands; and by other Soyles .... chiefly by Lime, and the way of Denshiring; whereby the most barren lands, hills and wasts may be converted to bear the richest burthens of corn, hay, and grass.'1 As the reviewer's language shows, Platt's vision of a moral economy that would, at a time of acute economic shortage, convert 'penury into plenty' still persisted nearly sixty years after his death. But by this time, backed by the persistent and vital need for increased agricultural productivity, a discourse of 'improvement' which overturned earlier orthodox versions of moral economics was powerfully in place. This essay will examine the gardening practices, theories, and rhetoric of Hugh Platt (1552-1608), well-known in his own time as an expert practitioner of natural knowledge, and show how these were refashioned by the 'new' seventeenth-century discourse. In her recent assessment of the impact of Elizabethan 'science' on Baconian reform of natural knowledge, Deborah Harkness argues that, despite Bacon's criticism of Elizabethan practitioners, the 'bases of Bacon's reformed science', such as 'experimentation, instrumentation, government support, and attention to utility', were already the bases of the practices of Platt and his contemporaries. However, the specificities of Platt's ideas and their seventeenth-century reception require more concerted attention than Harkness's intriguing and broad survey of Elizabethan science is able to give.2 Bacon and the first members of the Royal Society were evidently drawing on earlier practices, but in the course of their adaptation, the bases - especially ethical bases - of earlier knowledge-making were notably altered. In order to understand the often subtle processes of this change, it is necessary to note that what Harkness calls the earlier 'London science'3 was significantly influenced by its practitioners' experience of socio-economic crises, and particularly by their experience of dearth, as the 1675 review of Platt's gardening book makes clear.4 An examination of Platt's contribution to gardening and agriculture thus offers an important point of entry as it illustrates an approach to knowledge-making shaped by the economic crises of the practitioner's own milieu: such crises prompted Platt to assert the central importance of labour in the production of knowledge and to actively encourage the liberation of knowledge from propertied coteries. I will show how these ethical bases came to be articulated by Platt and also how they were put under pressure of erasure by the time his work on gardening was being both appreciated and modified by seventeenthcentury thinkers.The Royal Society reviewer, who stressed that rich but hidden resources of nature were waiting to be discovered so that barrenness and waste could be transformed into burdens of plenty, repeated and endorsed Platt's own expressions of his principal aim. Justifying his agricultural experiments in The Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594), Platt had written:For what eie doth not pitty to see the great weaknes and decay of our ancient and common mother the earth, which now is grown so aged & stricken in yeares, & so wounded at the hart with the ploughmans goad, that she beginneth to faint vnder the husbandmans hand, and groneth at the decay of hir natural Balsamum. For whose good health and recouerie, and for the better comfort of sundry simple and needie farmors of this land, I haue partly vndertaken these strange labors . …