The Shakespeare Garden

Esther Singleton

The Shakespeare Garden

EAN 8596547095316

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: DigiCat@okpublishing.info

Table of Contents

I The Medieval Pleasance

II The Garden of Delight

III The Italian Renaissance Garden

IV Bagh-i-vafa

V New Fad for Flowers

VI Tudor Gardens

VII Garden Pleasures

I Flower Lovers and Herbalists

II The Elizabethan Garden

III Old Garden Authors

IV Outlandish and English Flowers

I Primroses, Cowslips, and Oxlips

II Daffodils that Come Before the Swallow Dares

III Daisies Pied and Violets Blue

IV Lady-smocks all Silver White and Cuckoo Buds of Yellow Hue

V Anemones and Azured Harebells

VI Columbine and Broom-flower

I Morning Roses Newly Washed with Dew

II Lilies of All Kinds

III Crown-Imperial and Flower-de-luce

IV Fern and Honeysuckle

V Carnations and Gilliflowers

VI Marigold and Larkspur

VII Pansies for Thoughts and Poppies for Dreams

VIII Crow-flowers and Long Purples

IX Saffron Crocus and Cuckoo-flowers

X Pomegranate and Myrtle

I Rosemary and Rue

II Lavender, Mints, and Fennel

III Sweet Marjoram, Thyme, and Savory

IV Sweet Balm and Camomile

V Dian's Bud and Monk's-hood Blue

I Holly and Ivy

II Mistletoe and Box

I The Stately Garden

II The Small Garden

III Soil and Seed

IV The Gateway

V The Garden-House

VI The Mount

VII Rustic Arches

VIII Seats

IX Vases, Jars, and Tubs

X Fountains

XI The Dove-cote

XII The Sun-dial

XIII The Terrace

XIV The Pleached Alley

XV Hedges

XVI Paths

XVII Borders

XVIII Edgings

XIX Knots

XX The Rock-Garden

XXI Flowers

XXII Potpourri

A MASKE OF FLOWERS

COMPLETE LIST OF SHAKESPEARIAN FLOWERS WITH BOTANICAL IDENTIFICATIONS

APPENDIX

ELIZABETHAN GARDEN AT SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHPLACE

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PART ONE

THE GARDEN OF DELIGHT

EVOLUTION OF THE SHAKESPEARE

GARDEN

I

The Medieval Pleasance

Table of Contents

SHAKESPEARE was familiar with two kinds of gardens: the stately and magnificent garden that embellished the castles and manor-houses of the nobility and gentry; and the small and simple garden such as he had himself at Stratford-on-Avon and such as he walked through when he visited Ann Hathaway in her cottage at Shottery.

The latter is the kind that is now associated with Shakespeare's name; and when garden lovers devote a section of their grounds to a Shakespeare garden it is the small, enclosed garden, such as Perdita must have had, that they endeavor to reproduce.

The small garden of Shakespeare's day, which we so lovingly call by his name, was a little pleasure garden—a garden to stroll in and to sit in. The garden, moreover, had another purpose: it was intended to supply flowers for nosegays and herbs for strewings. The Shakespeare garden was a continuation, or development, of the Medieval Pleasance, where quiet ladies retired with their embroidery frames to work and dream of their Crusader lovers, husbands, fathers, sons, and brothers lying in the trenches before Acre and Ascalon, or storming the walls of Jerusalem and Jericho; where lovers sat hand in hand listening to the songs of birds and to the still sweeter songs from their own palpitating hearts; where men of affairs frequently repaired for a quiet chat, or refreshment of spirit; and where gay groups of lords and ladies gathered to tell stories, to enjoy the recitation of a wandering trouvère, or to sing to their lutes and viols, while jesters in doublets and hose of bright colors and cap and bells lounged nonchalantly on the grass to mock at all things—even love!

In the illuminated manuscripts of old romans, such as Huon of Bordeaux, the Romaunt of the Rose, Blonde of Oxford, Flore et Blancheflore, Amadis de Gaul, etc., there are many charming miniatures to illustrate the word-pictures. From them we learn that the garden was actually within the castle walls and very small. The walls of the garden were broken by turrets and pierced with a little door, usually opposite the chief entrance; the walks were paved with brick or stone, or they were sanded, or graveled; and at the intersection of these walks a graceful fountain usually tossed its spray upon the buds and blossoms. The little beds were laid out formally and were bright with flowers, growing singly and not in masses. Often, too, pots or vases were placed here and there at regular intervals, containing orange, lemon, bay, or cypress trees, their foliage beautifully trimmed in pyramids or globes that rose high above the tall stems. Not infrequently the garden rejoiced in a fruit-tree, or several fruit-trees. Stone or marble seats invitingly awaited visitors.

The note here was charming intimacy. It was a spot where gentleness and sweetness reigned, and where, perforce, every flower enjoyed the air it breathed. It was a Garden of Delight for flowers, birds, and men.

To trace the formal garden to its origin would take us far afield. We should have to go back to the ancient Egyptians, whose symmetrical and magnificent gardens were luxurious in the extreme; to Babylon, whose superb Hanging Gardens were among the Seven Wonders of the World; and to the Romans, who are still our teachers in the matter of beautiful gardening. The Roman villas that made Albion beautiful, as the great estates of the nobility and gentry make her beautiful to-day, lacked nothing in the way of ornamental gardens. Doubtless Pliny's garden was repeated again and again in the outposts of the Roman Empire. From these splendid Roman gardens tradition has been handed down.

There never has been a time in the history of England where the cultivation of the garden held pause. There is every reason to believe that the Anglo-Saxons were devoted to flowers. A poem in the Exeter Book has the lines:

Of odors sweetest

Such as in summer's tide

Fragrance send forth in places,

Fast in their stations,

Joyously o'er the plains,

Blown plants,

Honey-flowing.

No one could write blown-plants, honey-flowing without a deep and sophisticated love of flowers.

Every Anglo-Saxon gentleman had a garth, or garden, for pleasure, and an ort-garth for vegetables. In the garth the best loved flower was the lily, which blossomed beside the rose, sunflower, marigold, gilliflower, violet, periwinkle, honeysuckle, daisy, peony, and bay-tree.

Under the Norman kings, particularly Henry II, when the French and English courts were virtually the same, the citizens of London had gardens, large, beautiful, and planted with various kinds of trees. Possibly even older scribes wrote accounts of some of these, but the earliest description of an English garden is contained in De Naturis Rerum by Alexander Neckan, who lived in the second half of the Twelfth Century. A garden, he says, "should be adorned on this side with roses, lilies, the marigold, molis and mandrakes; on that side with parsley, cort, fennel, southernwood, coriander, sage, savory, hyssop, mint, rue, dittany, smallage, pellitory, lettuce, cresses, ortulano, and the peony. Let there also be beds enriched with onions, leeks, garlic, melons, and scallions. The garden is also enriched by the cucumber, which creeps on its belly, and by the soporiferous poppy, as well as by the daffodil and the acanthus. Nor let pot-herbs be wanting, if you can help it, such as beets, herb mercury, orache, and the mallow. It is useful also to the gardener to have anise, mustard, white pepper, and wormwood. And then Neckan goes on to the fruit-trees and medicinal plants. The gardener's tools at this time were merely a knife for grafting, an ax, a pruning-hook, and a spade. A hundred years later the gardens of France and England were still about the same. When John de Garlande (an appropriate name for an amateur horticulturist) was studying at the University of Paris (Thirteenth Century) he had a garden, which he described in his Dictionarus, quaintly speaking of himself in the third person: In Master John's garden are these plants: sage, parsley, dittany, hyssop, celandine, fennel, pellitory, the rose, the lily, the violet; and at the side (in the hedge), the nettle, the thistle and foxgloves. His garden also contains medicinal herbs, namely, mercury and the mallows, agrimony with nightshade and the marigold. Master John had also a special garden for pot-herbs and other herbs good for men's bodies, i.e., medicinal herbs, and a fruit garden, or orchard, of cherries, pears, nuts, apples, quinces, figs, plums, and grapes. About the same time Guillaume de Lorris wrote his Roman de la Rose"; and in this famous work of the Thirteenth Century there is a most beautiful description of the garden of the period. L'Amant (the Lover) while strolling on the banks of a river discovered this enchanting spot, full long and broad behind high walls. It was the Garden of Delight, or Pleasure, whose wife was Liesse, or Joy; and here they dwelt with the sweetest of companions. L'Amant wandered about until he found a small wicket door in the wall, at which he knocked and gained admittance. When he entered he was charmed. Everything was so beautiful that it seemed to him a spiritual place, better even than Paradise could be. Now, walking down a little path, bordered with mint and fennel, he reached the spot where Delight and his companions were dancing a carol to the song of Joy. L'Amant was invited to join the dance; and after it was finished he made a tour of the garden to see it all. And through his eyes we see it, too.

FIFTEENTH CENTURY GARDEN WITHIN CASTLE WALLS, FRENCH

The Garden of Delight was even and square, as long as it was large. It contained every known fruit-tree—peaches, plums, cherries, apples, and quinces, as well as figs, pomegranates, dates, almonds, chestnuts, and nutmegs. Tall pines, cypresses, and laurels formed screens and walls of greenery; and many a pair of elms, maples, ashes, oaks, aspens, yews, and poplars kept out the sun by their interwoven branches and protected the green grass. And here deer browsed fearlessly and squirrels in great plenty were seen leaping from bough to bough. Conduits of water ran through the garden and the moisture made the grass as thick and rich as velvet and the earth was as soft as a feather bed. And, moreover, the earth was of such a grace that it produced plenty of flowers, both winter and summer:

There sprang the violet all new

And fresh periwinkle rich of hue

And flowers yellow, white and red,

Such plenty grew there, never in mead.

Full joy was all the ground and quaint

And powdered as men had it paint

With many a fresh and sundry flower

That casteth up full good savor.

Myriads of birds were singing, too—larks, nightingales, finches, thrushes, doves, and canaries. L'Amant wandered on until he came to a marvelous fountain—the Fountain of Love—under a pine-tree.

Presently he was attracted to a beautiful rosebush, full of buds and full-blown roses. One bud, sweeter and fresher than all the rest and set so proudly on its spray, fascinated him. As he approached this flower, L'Amour discharged five arrows into his heart. The bud, of course, was the woman he was destined to love and which, after many adventures and trials, he was eventually to pluck and cherish.

This fanciful old allegory made a strong appeal to the illustrators of the Thirteenth and later centuries; and many beautiful editions are prized by libraries and preserved in glass cases. The edition from which the illustration (Fifteenth Century) is taken is from the Harleian MS. owned by the British Museum.

II

The Garden of Delight

Table of Contents

The old trouvères did not hesitate to stop the flow of their stories to describe the delights and beauties of the gardens. Many romantic scenes are staged in the Pleasance, to which lovers stole quietly through the tiny postern gate in the walls. When we remember what the feudal castle was, with its high, dark walls, its gloomy towers and loop-holes for windows, its cold floors, its secret hiding-places, and its general gloom, it is not surprising that the lords and ladies liked to escape into the garden. After the long, dreary winter what joy to see the trees burst into bloom and the tender flowers push their way through the sweet grass! Like the birds, the poets broke out into rapturous song, as, for instance, in Richard Cœur de Lion:

Merry is in the time of May,

Whenne fowlis synge in her lay;

Flowers on appyl trees and perye;[1]

Small fowlis[2] synge merye;

Ladyes strew their bowers

With red roses and lily flowers;

Great joy is in grove and lake.

[1] Pear.

[2] Birds.

In Chaucer's Franklyn's Tale Dorigen goes into her garden to try to divert herself in the absence of her husband:

And this was on the sixte morne of May,

Which May had painted with his softe shoures.

This gardeyn full of leves and of flowers:

And craft of mannes hand so curiously

Arrayed had this gardeyn of such pris,

As if it were the verray paradis.

In the Roman de Berte Charles Martel dines in the garden, when the rose is in bloom—que la rose est fleurie—and in La Mort de Garin a big dinner-party is given in the garden. Naturally the garden was the place of all places for lovers. In Blonde of Oxford Blonde and Jean meet in the garden under a blossoming pear-tree, silvery in the blue moonlight, and in the Roman of Maugis et la Belle Oriande the hero and heroine met in a garden to make merry and amuse themselves after they had dined; and it was the time for taking a little repose. It was in the month of May, the season when the birds sing and when all true lovers are thinking of their love.

In many of the illuminated manuscripts of these delightful romans there are pictures of ladies gathering flowers in the garden, sitting on the sward, or on stone seats, weaving chaplets and garlands; and these little pictures are drawn and painted with such skill and beauty that we have no difficulty in visualizing what life was like in a garden six hundred years ago.

So valued were these gardens—not only for their flowers but even more for the potential drugs, salves, unguents, perfumes, and ointments they held in leaf and petal, seed and root, in those days when every castle had to be its own apothecary storehouse—that the owner kept them locked and guarded the key. Song, story, and legend are full of incidents of the heroine's trouble in gaining possession of the key of the postern gate in order to meet at midnight her lover who adventurously scaled the high garden wall. The garden was indeed the happiest and the most romantic spot in the precincts of the feudal castle and the baronial manor-house.

We do not have to depend entirely upon the trouvères and poets for a knowledge of Medieval flowers. A manuscript of the Fifteenth Century (British Museum) contains a list of plants considered necessary for a garden. Here it is: violets, mallows, dandelions, mint, sage, parsley, golds,[3] marjoram, fennel, caraway, red nettle, daisy, thyme, columbine, basil, rosemary, gyllofre,[4] rue, chives, endive, red rose, poppy, cowslips of Jerusalem, saffron, lilies, and Roman peony.

[3] Marigolds.

[4] Gilliflower.

Herbs and flowers were classed together. Many were valued for culinary purposes and for medicinal purposes. The ladies of the castle and manor-house were learned in cookery and in the preparation of simples; and they guarded, tended, and gathered the herbs with perhaps even more care than they gave to the flowers. Medieval pictures of ladies, in tall peaked head dresses, fluttering veils, and graceful, flowing robes, gathering herbs in their gardens, are abundant in the old illustrated manuscripts.

III

The Italian Renaissance Garden

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It is but a step from this Medieval Pleasance to the Shakespeare garden. But before we try to picture what the Tudor gardens were like it will be worth our while to pause for a moment to consider the Renaissance garden of Italy on which the gardens that Shakespeare knew and loved were modeled. No one is better qualified to speak of these than Vernon Lee:

"One great charm of Renaissance gardens was the skillful manner in which Nature and Art were blended together. The formal design of the Giardino segreto agreed with the straight lines of the house, and the walls with their clipped hedges led on to the wilder freer growth of woodland and meadow, while the dense shade of the bosco supplied an effective contrast to the sunny spaces of lawn and flower-bed. The ancient practice of cutting box-trees into fantastic shapes, known to the Romans as the topiary art, was largely restored in the Fifteenth Century and became an essential part of Italian gardens. In that strange romance printed at the Aldine Press in 1499, the Hypernotomachia of Francesco Colonna, Polyphilus and his beloved are led through an enchanted garden where banquet-houses, temples and statues stand in the midst of myrtle groves and labyrinths on the banks of a shining stream. The pages of this curious book are adorned with a profusion of wood-cuts by some Venetian engraver, representing pergolas, fountains, sunk parterres, pillared loggie, clipped box and ilex-trees of every variety, which give a good idea of the garden artist then in vogue.

"Boccaccio and the Italians more usually employ the word orto, which has lost its Latin signification, and is a place, as we learn from the context, planted with fruit-trees and potherbs, the sage which brought misfortune on poor Simona and the sweet basil which Lisabetta watered, as it grew out of Lorenzo's head, only with rosewater, or that of orange-flowers, or with her own tears. A friend of mine has painted a picture of another of Boccaccio's ladies, Madonna Dianora, visiting the garden which the enamored Ansaldo has made to bloom in January by magic arts; a little picture full of the quaint lovely details of Dello's wedding-chests, the charm of roses and lilies, the flashing fountains and birds singing against a background of wintry trees, and snow-shrouded fields, dainty youths and damsels treading their way among the flowers, looking like tulips and ranunculus themselves in their fur and brocade. But although in this story Boccaccio employs the word giardino instead of orto, I think we must imagine that magic flower garden rather as a corner of orchard connected with fields of wheat and olive below by the long tunnels of vine-trellis and dying away into them with the great tufts of lavender and rosemary and fennel on the grassy bank under the cherry trees. This piece of terraced ground along which the water spurted from the dolphin's mouth, or the Siren's breasts—runs through walled channels, refreshing impartially violets and salads, lilies and tall, flowering onions under the branches of the peach-tree and the pomegranate, to where, in the shade of the great pink Oleander tufts, it pours out below into the big tank for the maids to rinse their linen in the evening and the peasants to fill their cans to water the bedded out tomatoes and the potted clove-pinks in the shadow of the house.

LOVERS IN THE CASTLE GARDEN, FIFTEENTH CENTURY MS.

GARDEN OF DELIGHT, ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE, FIFTEENTH CENTURY

"The Blessed Virgin's garden is like that where, as she prays in the cool of the evening, the gracious Gabriel flutters on to one knee (hushing the sound of his wings lest he startle her) through the pale green sky, the