Chapter XVI: Part II: The Garden-Craft of Shakespeare

"The flowers are sweet, the colours fresh and trim."

_Venus and Adonis._

"Retired Leisure
That in trim Gardens takes his pleasure."

MILTON, _Il Penseroso_.

GARDEN-CRAFT.

Any account of the "Plant-lore of Shakespeare" would be very incomplete if it did not include his "Garden-craft." There are a great many passages scattered throughout his works, some of them among the most beautiful that he ever wrote, in which no particular tree, herb, or flower is mentioned by name, but which show his intimate knowledge of plants and gardening, and his great affection for them. It is from these passages, even more than from the passages I have already quoted, in which particular flowers are named, that we learn how thoroughly his early country life had influenced and marked his character, and how his whole spirit was most naturally coloured by it. Numberless allusions to flowers and their culture prove that his boyhood and early manhood were spent in the country, and that as he passed through the parks, fields, and lanes of his native county, or spent pleasant days in the gardens and orchards of the manor-houses and farm-houses of the neighbourhood, his eyes and ears were open to all the sights and sounds of a healthy country life, and he was, perhaps unconsciously, laying up in his memory a goodly store of pleasant pictures and homely country talk, to be introduced in his own wonderful way in tragedies and comedies, which, while often professedly treating of very different times and countries, have really given us some of the most faithful pictures of the country life of the Englishman of Queen Elizabeth's time, drawn with all the freshness and simplicity that can only come from a real love of the subject.

"Flowers I noted," is his own account of himself (Sonnet xcix.), and with what love he noted them, and with what carefulness and faithfulness he wrote of them, is shown in every play he published, and almost in every act and every scene. And what I said of his notices of particular flowers is still more true of his general descriptions--that they are never laboured, or introduced as for a purpose, but that each passage is the simple utterance of his ingrained love of the country, the natural outcome of a keen, observant eye, joined to a great power of faithful description, and an unlimited command of the fittest language. It is this vividness and freshness that gives such a reality to all Shakespeare's notices of country life, and which make them such pleasant reading to all lovers of plants and gardening.

These notices of the "Garden-craft of Shakespeare" I now proceed to quote; but my quotations in this part will be made on a different plan to that which I adopted in the account of his "Plant-lore." I shall not here think it necessary to quote all the passages in which he mentions different objects of country life, but I shall content myself with such passages as throw light on his knowledge of horticulture, and which to some extent illustrate the horticulture of his day, and these passages I must arrange under a few general heads. In this way the second part of my subject will be very much shorter than my first, but I have good reasons for hoping that those who have been interested in the long account of the "Plant-lore of Shakespeare" will be equally interested in the shorter account of his "Garden-craft," and will acknowledge that the one would be incomplete without the other. I commence with those passages which treat generally of--

I.--FLOWERS, BLOSSOMS, AND BUDS.

(1) _Quickly._

Fairies use flowers for their charactery.

_Merry Wives of Windsor_, act v, sc. 5 (77).

(2) _Oberon._

She his hairy temples then had rounded
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers;
And that same dew, which sometime in the buds
Was wont to swell like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flowerets' eyes,
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.

_Midsummer Night's Dream_, act iv, sc. 1 (56).

(3) _Gaunt._

Suppose the singing birds musicians,
The grass whereon thou tread'st the presence strew'd,
The flowers fair ladies.

_Richard II_, act i, sc. 3 (288).

(4) _Katharine._

When I am dead, good wench,
Let me be used with honour; strew me over
With maiden flowers, that all the world may know
I was a chaste wife to my grave.

_Henry VIII_, act iv, sc. 2 (167).

(5) _Ophelia_ (sings).

White his shroud as the mountain snow
Larded with sweet flowers,
Which bewept to the grave did go
With true-love showers.

_Hamlet_, act iv, sc. 5 (35).

(6) _Queen._

Whiles yet the dew's on ground, gather those flowers.

_Cymbeline_, act i, sc. 5 (1).

(7) _Song._

Hark! hark! the lark at Heaven's gate sings,
And Phoebus 'gins to rise,
His steeds to water at those springs
On chaliced flowers that lies.

_Ibid._, act ii, sc. 3 (21).

(8) _Arviragus._

With fairest flowers,
While summer lasts and I live here, Fidele,
I'll sweeten thy sad grave.

_Ibid._, act iv, sc. 2 (218).

(9) _Belarius._

Here's a few flowers; but 'bout midnight, more;
The herbs that have on them cold dew o' the night
Are strewings fitt'st for graves. Upon their faces.
You were as flowers, now withered; even so
These herblets shall, which we upon you strew.

_Ibid._ (283).

(10) _Juliet._

This bud of love, by summer's ripening breath,
May prove a beauteous flower when next we meet.

_Romeo and Juliet_, act ii, sc. 2 (121).

(11) _Titania._

An odorous chaplet of sweet summer-buds.

_Midsummer Night's Dream_, act ii, sc. 1 (110).

(12) _Friar Laurence._

I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds, and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that's Nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb,
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain'd from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

_Romeo and Juliet_, act ii, sc. 3 (7).

(13) _Iago._

Though other things grow fair against the sun,
Yet fruits that blossom first will first be ripe.

_Othello_, act ii, sc. 3 (382).

(14) _Dumain._

Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom, passing fair
Playing in the wanton air;
Through the velvet leaves the wind,
All unseen, can passage find.

_Love's Labour's Lost_, act iv, sc. 3 (102).

(15)

Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime
Rot and consume themselves in little time.

_Venus and Adonis_ (131).

(16)

The flowers are sweet, the colours fresh and trim,
But true-sweet beauty lived and died with him.

_Venus and Adonis_ (1079).

(17)

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.

_Sonnet_ xviii.

(18)

With April's first-born flowers, and all things rare,
That Heaven's air in this huge rondure hems.

_Ibid._ xxi.

(19)

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die;
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

_Ibid._ xciv.

(20)

Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.

_Ibid._ xcviii.

"Of all the vain assumptions of these coxcombical times, that which arrogates the pre-eminence in the true science of gardening is the vainest. True, our conservatories are full of the choicest plants from every clime: we ripen the Grape and the Pine-apple with an art unknown before, and even the Mango, the Mangosteen, and the Guava are made to yield their matured fruits; but the real beauty and poetry of a garden are lost in our efforts after rarity, and strangeness, and variety." So, nearly forty years ago, wrote the author of "The Poetry of Gardening," a pleasant, though somewhat fantastic essay, first published in the "Carthusian," and afterwards re-published in Murray's "Reading for the Rail," in company with an excellent article from the "Quarterly" by the same author under the title of "The Flower Garden;" and I quote it because this "vain assumption" is probably stronger and more widespread now than when that article was written. We often hear and read accounts of modern gardening in which it is coolly assumed, and almost taken for granted, that the science of horticulture, and almost the love of flowers, is a product of the nineteenth century. But the love of flowers is no new taste in Englishmen, and the science of horticulture is in no way a modern science. We have made large progress in botanical science during the present century, and our easy communications with the whole habitable globe have brought to us thousands of new and beautiful plants in endless varieties; and we have many helps in gardening that were quite unknown to our forefathers. Yet there were brave old gardeners in our forefathers' times, and a very little acquaintance with the literature of the sixteenth century will show that in Shakespeare's time there was a most healthy and manly love of flowers for their own sake, and great industry and much practical skill in gardening. We might, indeed, go much further back than the fifteenth century, and still find the same love and the same skill. We have long lists of plants grown in times before the Conquest, with treatises on gardening, in which there is much that is absurd, but which show a practical experience in the art, and which show also that the gardens of those days were by no means ill-furnished either with fruit or flowers. Coming a little later, Chaucer takes every opportunity to speak with a most loving affection for flowers, both wild and cultivated, and for well-kept gardens; and Spenser's poems show a familiar acquaintance with them, and a warm admiration for them. Then in Shakespeare's time we have full records of the gardens and gardening which must have often met his eye; and we find that they were not confined to a few fine places here and there, but that good gardens were the necessary adjunct to every country house, and that they were cultivated with a zeal and a skill that would be a credit to any gardener of our own day. In Harrison's description of "England in Shakespeare's Youth," recently published by the new Shakespeare Society, we find that Harrison himself, though only a poor country parson, "took pains with his garden, in which, though its area covered but 300ft. of ground, there was 'a simple' for each foot of ground, no one of them being common or usually to be had." About the same time Gerard's Catalogues show that he grew in his London garden more than a thousand species of hardy plants; and Lord Bacon's famous "Essay on Gardens" not only shows what a grand idea of gardening he had himself, but also that this idea was not Utopian, but one that sprang from personal acquaintance with stately gardens, and from an innate love of gardens and flowers. Almost at the same time, but a little later, we come to the celebrated "John Parkinson, Apothecary of London, the King's Herbarist," whose "Paradisus Terrestris," first published in 1629, is indeed "a choise garden of all sorts of rarest flowers." His collection of plants would even now be considered an excellent collection, if it could be brought together, while his descriptions and cultural advice show him to have been a thorough practical gardener, who spoke of plants and gardens from the experience of long-continued hard work amongst them. And contemporary with him was Milton, whose numerous descriptions of flowers are nearly all of cultivated plants, as he must have often seen them in English gardens.

And so we are brought to the conclusion that in the passages quoted above in which Shakespeare speaks so lovingly and tenderly of his favourite flowers, these expressions are not to be put down to the fancy of the poet, but that he was faithfully describing what he daily saw or might have seen, and what no doubt he watched with that carefulness and exactness which could only exist in conjunction with a real affection for the objects on which he gazed, "the fresh and fragrant flowers," "the pretty flow'rets," "the sweet flowers," "the beauteous flowers," "the sweet summer buds," "the blossoms passing fair," "the darling buds of May."

II.--GARDENS.

(1) _King_ (reads).

It standeth north-north-east and by east from the west corner
of thy curious-knotted Garden.

_Loves Labour's Lost_, act i, sc. 1 (248).

(2) _Isabella._

He hath a Garden circummured with brick,
Whose western side is with a Vineyard back'd;
And to that Vineyard is a planched gate
That makes his opening with this bigger key:
The other doth command a little door
Which from the Vineyard to the garden leads.

_Measure for Measure_, act iv, sc. 1 (28).

(3) _Antonio._

The Prince and Count Claudio, walking in a thick-pleached
alley in my orchard, were thus much overheard by a man of
mine.

_Much Ado About Nothing_, act i, sc. 2 (9).

(4) _Iago._

Our bodies are our Gardens, &c.

(_See_ HYSSOP.) _Othello_, act i, sc. 3 (323).

(5) _1st Servant._

Why should we, in the compass of a pale,
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing as in a model our firm estate,
When our sea-walled Garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruin'd,
Her knots disorder'd and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?

_Richard II_, act iii, sc. 4 (40).

The flower-gardens of Shakespeare's time were very different to the flower-gardens of our day; but we have so many good descriptions of them in books and pictures that we have no difficulty in realizing them both in their general form and arrangement. I am now speaking only of the flower-gardens; the kitchen-gardens and orchards were very much like our own, except in the one important difference, that they had necessarily much less glass than our modern gardens can command. In the flower-garden the grand leading principle was uniformity and formality carried out into very minute details. "The garden is best to be square," was Lord Bacon's rule; "the form that men like in general is a square, though roundness be _forma perfectissima_," was Lawson's rule; and this form was chosen because the garden was considered to be a purtenance and continuation of the house, designed so as strictly to harmonize with the architecture of the building. And Parkinson's advice was to the same effect: "The orbicular or round form is held in its own proper existence to be the most absolute form, containing within it all other forms whatsoever; but few, I think, will chuse such a proportion to be joyned to their habitation. The triangular or three-square form is such a form also as is seldom chosen by any that may make another choise. The four-square form is the most usually accepted with all, and doth best agree with any man's dwelling."

This was the shape of the ideal garden--

"And whan I had a while goon,
I saugh a gardyn right anoon,
Full long and broad; and every delle
Enclosed was, and walled welle
With high walles embatailled.

* * * * *

I felle fast in a waymenting
By which art, or by what engyne
I might come into that gardyne;
But way I couthe fynd noon
Into that gardyne for to goon.

* * * * *

Tho' gan I go a fulle grete pas,
Environyng evene in compas,
The closing of the square walle,
Tyl that I fonde a wiket smalle
So shett that I ne'er myght in gon,
And other entre was ther noon."

_Romaunt of the Rose._

This square enclosure was bounded either by a high wall--"circummured with brick," "with high walles embatailled,"--or with a thick high hedge--"encompassed on all the four sides with a stately arched hedge." These hedges were made chiefly of Holly or Hornbeam, and we can judge of their size by Evelyn's description of his "impregnable hedge of about 400ft. in length, 9ft. high, and 5ft. in diameter." Many of these hedges still remain in our old gardens. Within this enclosure the garden was accurately laid out in formal shapes,[343:1] with paths either quite straight or in some strictly mathematical figures--

"And all without were walkes and alleyes dight
With divers trees enrang'd in even rankes;
And here and there were pleasant arbors pight,
And shadie seats, and sundry flowring bankes,
To sit and rest the walkers' wearie shankes."

_F. Q._, iv, x, 25.

The main walks were not, as with us, bounded with the turf, but they were bounded with trees, which were wrought into hedges, more or less open at the sides, and arched over at the top. These formed the "close alleys," "coven alleys," or "thick-pleached alleys," of which we read in Shakespeare and others writers of that time. Many kinds of trees and shrubs were used for this purpose; "every one taketh what liketh him best, as either Privit alone, or Sweet Bryer and White Thorn interlaced together, and Roses of one, two, or more sorts placed here and there amongst them. Some also take Lavender, Rosemary, Sage, Southernwood, Lavender Cotton, or some such other thing. Some again plant Cornel trees, and plash them or keep them low to form them into a hedge; and some again take a low prickly shrub that abideth always green, called in Latin Pyracantha" (Parkinson). It was on these hedges and their adjuncts that the chief labour of the garden was spent. They were cut and tortured into every imaginable shape, for nothing came amiss to the fancy of the topiarist. When this topiary art first came into fashion in England I do not know, but it was probably more or less the fashion in all gardens of any pretence from very early times, and it reached its highest point in the sixteenth century, and held its ground as the perfection of gardening till it was driven out of the field in the last century by the "picturesque style," though many specimens still remain in England, as at Levens[344:1] and Hardwicke on a large scale, and in the gardens of many ancient English mansions and old farmhouses on a smaller scale. It was doomed as soon as landscape gardeners aimed at the natural, for even when it was still at its height Addison described it thus: "Our British gardeners, instead of humouring Nature, love to deviate from it as much as possible. Our trees rise in cones, globes, and pyramids; we see the mark of the scissors upon every plant and bush."

But this is a digression: I must return to the Elizabethan garden, which I have hitherto only described as a great square, surrounded by wide, covered, shady walks, and with other similar walks dividing the central square into four or more compartments. But all this was introductory to the great feature of the Elizabethan garden, the formation of the "curious-knotted garden." Each of the large compartments was divided into a complication of "knots," by which was meant beds arranged in quaint patterns, formed by rule and compass with mathematical precision, and so numerous that it was a necessary part of the system that the whole square should be fully occupied by them. Lawn there was none; the whole area was nothing but the beds and the paths that divided them. There was Grass in other parts of the pleasure grounds, and apparently well kept, for Lord Bacon has given his opinion that "nothing is more pleasant to the eye than green Grass kept finely shorn," but it was apparently to be found only in the orchard, the bowling-green, or the "wilderness;" in the flower-garden proper it had no place. The "knots" were generally raised above the surface of the paths, the earth being kept in its place by borders of lead, or tiles, or wood, or even bones; but sometimes the beds and paths were on the same level, and then there were the same edgings that we now use, as Thrift, Box, Ivy, flints, &c. The paths were made of gravel, sand, spar, &c., and sometimes with coloured earths: but against this Lord Bacon made a vigorous protest: "As to the making of knots or figures with divers coloured earths, that they may lie under the windows of the house on that side on which the garden stands they be but toys; you may see as good sights many times in tarts."

The old gardening books are full of designs for these knots; indeed, no gardening book of the date seems to have been considered complete if it did not give the "latest designs," and they seem to have much tried the wit and ingenuity of the gardeners, as they must have also sorely tried their patience to keep them in order; and I doubt not that the efficiency of an Elizabethan gardener was as much tested by his skill and experience in "knot-work," as the efficiency of a modern gardener is tested by his skill in "bedding-out," which is the lineal descendant of "knot-work." In one most essential point, however, the two systems very much differed. In "bedding-out" the whole force of the system is spent in producing masses of colours, the individual flowers being of no importance, except so far as each flower contributes its little share of colour to the general mass; and it is for this reason that so many of us dislike the system, not only because of its monotony, but more especially because it has a tendency "to teach us to think too little about the plants individually, and to look at them chiefly as an assemblage of beautiful colours. It is difficult in those blooming masses to separate one from another; all produce so much the same sort of impression. The consequence is people see the flowers on the beds without caring to know anything about them or even to ask their names. It was different in the older gardens, because there was just variety there; the plants strongly contrasted with each other, and we were ever passing from the beautiful to the curious. Now we get little of quaintness or mystery, or of the strange delicious thought of being lost or embosomed in a tall rich wood of flowers. All is clear, definite, and classical, the work of a too narrow and exclusive taste."--FORBES WATSON. The old "knot-work" was not open to this censure, though no doubt it led the way which ended in "bedding-out." The beginning of the system crept in very shortly after Shakespeare's time. Parkinson spoke of an arrangement of spring flowers which, when "all planted in some proportion as near one unto another as is fit for them will give such a grace to the garden that the place will seem like a piece of tapestry of many glorious colours, to encrease every one's delight." And again--"The Tulipas may be so matched, one colour answering and setting off another, that the place where they stand may resemble a piece of curious needlework or piece of painting." But these plants were all perennial, and remained where they were once planted, and with this one exception named by Parkinson, the planting of knot-work was as different as possible from the modern planting of carpet-beds. The beds were planted inside their thick margins with a great variety of plants, and apparently set as thick as possible, like Harrison's garden quoted above, with its 300 separate plants in as many square feet. These were nearly all hardy perennials,[347:1] with the addition of a few hardy annuals, and the great object seems to have been to have had something of interest or beauty in these gardens at all times of the year. The principle of the old gardeners was that "Nature abhors a vacuum," and, as far as their gardens went, they did their best to prevent a vacuum occurring at any time. In this way I think they surpassed us in their practical gardening, for, even if they did not always succeed, it was surely something for them to aim (in Lord Bacon's happy words), "to have _ver perpetuum_ as the place affords."

Where the space would allow of it, the garden was further decorated with statues, fountains, "fair mounts," labyrinths, mazes,[347:2] arbours and alcoves, rocks, "great Turkey jars," and "in some corner (or more) a true Dial or Clock, and some Antick works" (Lawson). These things were fitting ornaments in such formal gardens, but the best judges saw that they were not necessaries, and that the garden was complete without them. "They be pretty things to look on, but nothing for health or sweetness." "Such things are for state and magnificence, but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden."

Such was the Elizabethan garden in its general outlines; the sort of garden which Shakespeare must have often seen both in Warwickshire and in London. According to our present ideas such a garden would be far too formal and artificial, and we may consider that the present fashion of our gardens is more according to Milton's idea of Eden, in which there grew--

"Flowers worthy of Paradise, which not nice art
In beds and curious knots, but Nature boon
Poured forth profuse on hill and dale and plaine."

_Paradise Lost_, book iv.

None of us probably would now wish to exchange the straight walks and level terraces of the sixteenth century for our winding walks and undulating lawns, in the laying out of which the motto has been "ars est celare artem"--

"That which all faire workes doth most aggrace,
The art, which all that wrought, appeareth in no place."

_F. Q._, ii, xii, 58.

Yet it is pleasant to look back upon these old gardens, and to see how they were cherished and beloved by some of the greatest and noblest of Englishmen. Spenser has left on record his judgment on the gardens of his day--

"To the gay gardens his unstaid desire
Him wholly carried, to refresh his sprights;
There lavish Nature, in her best attire,
Poures forth sweete odors and alluring sights:
And Arte, with her contending, doth aspire
To excell the naturall with made delights;
And all, that faire or pleasant may be found,
In riotous excesse doth there abound.

* * * * *

There he arriving around about doth flie,
From bed to bed, from one to other border;
And takes survey, with curious busie eye,
Of every flowre and herbe there set in order."

_Muiopotmos._

Clearly in Spenser's eyes the formalities of an Elizabethan garden (for we must suppose he had such in his thoughts) did not exclude nature or beauty.

It was also with such formal gardens in his mind and before his eyes that Lord Bacon wrote his "Essay on Gardens," and commenced it with the well-known sentence (for I must quote him once again for the last time), "God Almighty first planted a garden, and indeed it is the purest of all human pleasures; it is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks; and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegance, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection." And, indeed, in spite of their stiffness and unnaturalness, there must have been a great charm in those gardens, and though it would be antiquarian affectation to attempt or wish to restore them, yet there must have been a stateliness about them which our gardens have not, and they must have had many points of real comfort which it seems a pity to have lost. Those long shady "covert alleys," with their "thick-pleached" sides and roof, must have been very pleasant places to walk in, giving shelter in winter, and in summer deep shade, with the pleasant smell of Sweet Brier and Roses. They must have been the very places for a thoughtful student, who desired quiet and retirement for his thoughts--

"And adde to these retired leisure
That in trim gardens takes his pleasure"--

_Il Penseroso._

and they must have been also "pretty retiring places for conference" for friends in council. The whole fashion of the Elizabethan garden has passed away, and will probably never be revived; but before we condemn it as a ridiculous fashion, unworthy of the science of gardening, we may remember that it held its ground in England for nearly two hundred years, and that during that time the gardens of England and the flowers they bore won not the cold admiration, but the warm affection of the greatest names in English history, the affection of such a queen as Elizabeth,[349:1] of such a grave and wise philosopher as Bacon, of such a grand hero as Raleigh, of such poets as Spenser and Shakespeare.

FOOTNOTES:

[343:1] These beds (as we should now call them) were called "tables" or "plots"--

"Mark out the tables, ichon by hem selve
Sixe foote in brede, and xii in length is beste
To clense and make on evey side honest."

_Palladius on Husbandrie_, i. 116.

"Note this generally that all plots are square."--LAWSON'S _New Orchard_, p. 60.

[344:1] For an account of Levens, with a plate of the Topiarian garden, see "Archæological Journal," vol. xxvi.

[347:1] Including shrubs--

"'Tis another's lot
To light upon some gard'ner's curious knot,
Where she upon her breast (love's sweet repose),
Doth bring the Queen of flowers, the English Rose."

BROWNE'S _Brit. Past._, i, 2.

[347:2] For a good account of mazes and labyrinths see "Archæological Journal," xiv. 216.

[349:1] Queen Elizabeth's love of gardening and her botanical knowledge were celebrated in a Latin poem by an Italian who visited England in 1586, and wrote a long poem under the name of "Melissus."--See _Archæologia_, vol. vii. 120.

III.--GARDENERS.

(1) _Queen._

But stay, here come the gardeners;
Let's step into the shadow of these trees.

* * * * *

Thou, old Adam's likeness, set to dress this garden,
How dares thy harsh rude tongue sound this unpleasing news?
What Eve, what serpent, hath suggested thee
To make a second fall of cursed man?
Why dost thou say King Richard is deposed?
Darest thou, thou little better thing than earth,
Divine his downfal?

_Richard II_, act iii, sc. 4 (24, 72).

(2) _Clown._

Come, my spade. There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners,
ditchers, and grave-makers; they hold up Adam's profession.

_Hamlet_, act v, sc. 1 (34).

Very little is recorded of the gardeners of the sixteenth century, by which we can judge either of their skill or their social position. Gerard frequently mentions the names of different persons from whom he obtained plants, but without telling us whether they were professional or amateur gardeners or nurserymen; and Hakluyt has recorded the name of Master Wolfe as gardener to Henry VIII. Certainly Richard II.'s Queen did not speak with much respect to her gardener, reproving him for his "harsh rude tongue," and addressing him as a "little better thing than earth"--but her angry grief may account for that. Parkinson also has not much to say in favour of the gardeners of his day, but considers it his duty to warn his readers against them: "Our English gardeners are all, or the most of them, utterly ignorant in the ordering of their outlandish (_i.e._, exotic) flowers as not being trained to know them. . . . And I do wish all gentlemen and gentlewomen, whom it may concern for their own good, to be as careful whom they trust with the planting and replanting of their fine flowers, as they would be with so many jewels, for the roots of many of them being small and of great value may soon be conveyed away, and a clean tale fair told, that such a root is rotten or perished in the ground if none be seen where it should be, or else that the flower hath changed his colour when it hath been taken away, or a counterfeit one hath been put in the place thereof; and thus many have been deceived of their daintiest flowers, without remedy or true knowledge of the defect." And again, "idle and ignorant gardeners who get names by stealth as they do many other things." This is not a pleasant picture either of the skill or honesty of the sixteenth-century gardeners, but there must have been skilled gardeners to keep those curious-knotted gardens in order, so as to have a "_ver perpetuum_ all the year." And there must have been men also who had a love for their craft; and if some stole the rare plants committed to their charge, we must hope that there were some honest men amongst them, and that they were not all like old Andrew Fairservice, in "Rob Roy," who wished to find a place where he "wad hear pure doctrine, and hae a free cow's grass, and a cot and a yard, and mair than ten punds of annual fee," but added also, "and where there's nae leddy about the town to count the Apples."

IV.--GARDENING OPERATIONS.

A. PRUNING, ETC.

(1) _Orlando._

But, poor old man, thou prunest a rotten tree,
That cannot so much as a blossom yield
In lieu of all thy pains and industry.

_As you Like It_, act ii, sc. 3 (63).

(2) _Gardener._

Go, bind thou up yon dangling Apricocks,
Which, like unruly children, make their sire
Stoop with oppression of their prodigal weight:
Give some supportance to the bending twigs.
Go thou, and like an executioner,
Cut off the heads of too-fast growing sprays,
That look too lofty in our commonwealth:
All must be even in our government.
You thus employ'd, I would go root away
The noisome weeds, which without profit suck
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers.

* * * * *

O, what pity is it,
That he had not so trimm'd and dress'd his land
As we this garden! We at time of year
Do wound the bark, the skin of our fruit-trees,
Lest, being over-proud in sap and blood,
With too much riches it confound itself:
Had he done so to great and growing men,
They might have lived to bear and he to taste
Their fruits of duty; superfluous branches
We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down.

_Richard II_, act iii, sc. 4 (29).

This most interesting passage would almost tempt us to say that Shakespeare was a gardener by profession; certainly no other passages that have been brought to prove his real profession are more minute than this. It proves him to have had practical experience in the work, and I think we may safely say that he was no mere 'prentice hand in the use of the pruning knife.

The art of pruning in his day was probably exactly like our own, as far as regarded fruit trees and ordinary garden work, but in one important particular the pruner's art of that day was a for more laborious art than it is now. The topiary art must have been the triumph of pruning, and when gardens were full of castles, monsters, beasts, birds, fishes, and men, all cut out of Box and Yew, and kept so exact that they boasted of being the "living representations" and "counterfeit presentments" of these various objects, the hands and head of the pruner could seldom have been idle; the pruning knife and scissors must have been in constant demand from the first day of the year to the last. The pruner of that day was, in fact, a sculptor, who carved his images out of Box and Yew instead of marble, so that in an amusing article in the "Guardian" for 1713 (No. 173), said to have been written by Pope, is a list of such sculptured objects for sale, and we are told that the "eminent town gardener had arrived to such perfection that he cuts family pieces of men, women, and children. Any ladies that please may have their own effigies in Myrtle, or their husbands in Hornbeam. He is a Puritan wag, and never fails when he shows his garden to repeat that passage in the Psalms, 'Thy wife shall be as the fruitful Vine, and thy children as Olive branches about thy table.'"

B. MANURING, ETC.

_Constable._

And you shall find his vanities forespent
Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus,
Covering discretion with a coat of folly;
As gardeners do with ordure hide those roots
That shall first spring and be most delicate.

_Henry V_, act ii, sc. 4 (36).

The only point that needs notice under this head is that the word "manure" in Shakespeare's time was not limited to its present modern meaning. In his day "manured land" generally meant cultured land in opposition to wild and barren land.[353:1] So Falstaff uses the word--

Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold
blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like
lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled
with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of
fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant.

_2nd Henry IV_, act iv, sc. 3 (126).

And in the same way Iago says--

Either to have it (a garden) sterile with idleness or manured
with industry.

_Othello_, act i, sc. 3 (296).

Milton and many other writers used the word in this its original sense; and Johnson explains it "to cultivate by manual labour," according to its literal derivation. In one passage Shakespeare uses the word somewhat in the modern sense--

_Carlisle._ The blood of English shall manure the ground.

_Richard II_, act iv, sc. 1 (137).

But generally he and the writers of that and the next century expressed the operation more simply and plainly, as "covering with ordure," or as in the English Bible, "I shall dig about it and dung it."

C. GRAFTING.

(1) _Buckingham._

Her royal stock graft with ignoble plants.

_Richard III_, act iii, sc. 7 (127).

(2) _Dauphin._

O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us,
The emptying of our fathers' luxury,
Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,
Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds,
And overlook their grafters?

_Henry V_, act iii, sc. 5 (5).

(3) _King._

His plausive words
He scatter'd not in ears, but grafted them,
To grow there and to bear.

_All's Well that Ends Well_, act i, sc. 2 (53).

(4) _Perdita._

The fairest flowers o' the season
Are our Carnations and streak'd Gillyvors,
Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden's barren; I care not
To get slips of them.

_Polixenes._

Wherefore, gentle maiden,
Do you neglect them?

_Perdita._
For I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating Nature.

_Polixenes._

Say there be;
Yet Nature is made better by no mean,
But Nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to Nature, is an art
That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentle scion to the wildest stock,
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.

_Perdita._

So it is.

_Polixenes._

Then make your garden rich in Gillyvors,
And do not call them bastards.

_Perdita._

I'll not put
The dibble in the earth to set one slip of them.

_Winter's Tale_, act iv, sc. 4 (81).

The various ways of propagating plants by grafts, cuttings, slips, and artificial impregnation (all mentioned in the above passages), as used in Shakespeare's day, seem to have been exactly like those of our own time, and so they need no further comment.

FOOTNOTES:

[353:1] The Act 31 Eliz. c. 7, enacts that "noe person shall within this Realme of England make buylde or erect any Buyldinge or Howsinge . . . . as a Cottage for habitation . . . . unlesse the same person do assigne and laye to the same Cottage or Buyldinge fower acres of Grounde at the least . . . to be contynuallie occupied and manured therewith." Gerard's Chapter on Vines is headed, "Of the manured Vine."

V.--GARDEN ENEMIES.

A. WEEDS.

(1) _Hamlet._

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fye on it, ah fye! 'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

_Hamlet_, act i, sc. 2 (133).

(2) _Titus._

Such withered herbs as these
Are meet for plucking up.

_Titus Andronicus_, act iii, sc. 1 (178).

(3) _York._

Grandam, one night, as we did sit at supper,
My Uncle Rivers talk'd how I did grow
More than my brother. "Ay," quoth my Uncle Glo'ster,
"Small herbs have grace, great weeds do grow apace;"
And since, methinks, I would not grow so fast,
Because sweet flowers are slow and weeds make haste.

_Richard III_, act ii, sc. 4 (10).

(4) _Queen._

Now 'tis the spring, and weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden,
And choke the herbs for want of husbandry.

_2nd Henry VI_, act iii, sc. 1 (31).

(5)

Unruly blasts wait on the tender spring,
Unwholesome weeds take root with precious flowers.

_Lucrece_ (869).

(6) _K. Henry._

Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds.

_2nd Henry IV_, act iv, sc. 4 (54).

The weeds of Shakespeare need no remark; they were the same as ours; and, in spite of our improved cultivation, our fields and gardens are probably as full of weeds as they were three centuries ago.

B. BLIGHTS, FROSTS, ETC.

(1) _York._

Thus are my blossoms blasted in the bud,
And caterpillars eat my leaves away.

_2nd Henry VI_, act iii, sc. 1 (89).

(2) _Montague._

But he, his own affection's counsellor,
Is to himself--I will not say, how true--
But to himself so sweet and close,
So far from sounding and discovery,
As is the bud bit with an envious worm,
Ere he can spread his sweet leaves to the air,
Or dedicate his beauty to the sun.

_Romeo and Juliet_, act i, sc. 1 (153).

(3) _Imogene._

Comes in my father,
And like the tyrannous breathing of the north
Shakes all our buds from growing.

_Cymbeline_, act i, sc. 3 (35).

(4) _Bardolph._

A cause on foot
Lives so in hope as in an early spring
We see the appearing buds--which to prove fruit,
Hope gives not so much warrant as despair
That frost will bite them.

_2nd Henry IV_, act i, sc. 3 (37).

(5) _Violet._

She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek.

_Twelfth Night_, act ii, sc. 4 (113).

(6) _Proteus._

Yet writers say, as in the sweetest bud
The eating canker dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.

_Valentine._

And writers say as the most forward bud
Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,
Even so by love the young and tender wit
Is turn'd to folly, blasting in the bud,
Losing his verdure even in the prime
And all the fair effects of future hopes.

_Two Gentlemen of Verona_, act i, sc. 1 (42).

(7) _Capulet._

Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of the field.

_Romeo and Juliet_, act iv, sc. 5 (28).

(8) _Lysimachus._

O sir, a courtesy
Which if we should deny, the most just gods
For every graff would send a caterpillar,
And so afflict our province.

_Pericles_, act v, sc. 1 (58).

(9) _Wolsey._

This is the state of man: to-day he puts forth
The tender leaves of hopes, to-morrow blossoms,
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him:
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And, when he thinks, good easy man, full surely
His greatness is a-ripening, nips his root,
And then he falls, as I do.

_Henry VIII_, act iii, sc. 2 (352).

(10) _Saturninus._

These tidings nip me, and I hang the head
As Flowers with frost, or Grass beat down with storms.

_Titus Andronicus_, act iv, sc. 4 (70).

(11)

No man inveigh against the withered flower,
But chide rough winter that the flower hath kill'd;
Not that devour'd, but that which doth devour,
Is worthy blame.

_Lucrece_ (1254).

(12)

For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'ersnow'd, and bareness everywhere;
Then, were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was;
But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.[357:1]

_Sonnet_ v.

With this beautiful description of the winter-life of hardy perennial plants, I may well close the "Plant-lore and Garden-craft of Shakespeare." The subject has stretched to a much greater extent than I at all anticipated when I commenced it, but this only shows how large and interesting a task I undertook, for I can truly say that my difficulty has been in the necessity for condensing my matter, which I soon found might be made to cover a much larger space than I have given to it; for my object was in no case to give an exhaustive account of the flowers, but only to give such an account of each plant as might illustrate its special use by Shakespeare.

Having often quoted my favourite authority in gardening matters, old "John Parkinson, Apothecary, of London," I will again make use of him to help me to say my last words: "Herein I have spent my time, pains, and charge, which, if well accepted, I shall think well employed. And thus I have finished this work, and have furnished it with whatsoever could bring delight to those that take pleasure in those things, which how well or ill done I must abide every one's censure; the judicious and courteous I only respect; and so Farewell."

FOOTNOTES:

[357:1]

"Flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together,
All the hard weather
Dead to the world, keep house unknown."

G. HERBERT, _The Flower_.