The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare
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._