Ralph Austen

Ralph Austen (c. 1612–1676) was an English writer on gardening, who also worked to popularize cider as a beverage.

Austen was a native of Staffordshire. He spent the second part of his life in Oxford, devoting most of his time to gardening and the raising of fruit-trees. In 1647 he became deputy-registrary to the Parliamentary visitation of Oxford University, and subsequently registrary in his own right. He also ran a very successful nursery business, selling grafts and seedlings.

One of the Hartlib Circle, Austen was associated with Samuel Hartlib in a petition to Oliver Cromwell for the improvement of orchards and forestry. He was interested in expanding onto confiscated lands at Shotover Forest. He worked to spread cider, then known only in the West Country, exchanging grafts with John Beale.

According to Anthony Wood, Austen died in his house in the parish of St. Peter-le-Bailey, Oxford, and was buried in its church, in the aisle adjoining the south side of the chancel, 26 October 1676. He had been a gardener and planting trees for half a century.

In 1653 Austen published A Treatise on Fruit-trees, showing the manner of grafting, setting, pruning, and ordering of them in all respects, and along with it a long pamphlet on the Spiritual Use of an Orchard. Austen made researches in the Bodleian Library, and wrote fuller accounts of pruning and grafting than had been in print. One encouragement to publish was the success of Walter Blith's The English Improver, or, A New Survey of Husbandry, which first appeared in 1649. Blith was another of the Calvinistic Hartlib Circle, whose members could see spiritual as well as practical significant in agriculture and horticulture. Austen took the meaning of grafting to be the possibility of return to before the Fall of Man, with the metaphor of wild grafts being returned to the stocks of the Garden.

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