Shakespeare garden

An illustration from Walter Crane's 1906 book, Flowers from Shakespeare's Garden: a Posy from the Plays

A Shakespeare garden is a themed garden that cultivates plants mentioned in the works of William Shakespeare. In English-speaking countries, particularly the United States, these are often public gardens associated with parks, universities, and Shakespeare festivals. Shakespeare gardens are sites of cultural, educational, and romantic interest and can be locations for outdoor weddings.^[1]

Signs near the plants usually provide relevant quotations. A Shakespeare garden usually includes several dozen species, either in herbaceous profusion or in a geometric layout with boxwood dividers. Typical amenities are walkways and benches and a weather-resistant bust of Shakespeare. Shakespeare gardens may accompany reproductions of Elizabethan architecture. Some Shakespeare gardens also grow species typical of the Elizabethan period but not mentioned in Shakespeare's plays or poetry.

Shakepeare is reputed to have been an avid gardener, though his opportunities in London would have been very limited.^[2] In January or February 1631 Sir Thomas Temple, 1st Baronet of Stowe, was eager to send his man for cuttings from the grapevines at New Place, Stratford, the home of Shakespeare's retirement. Temple's surviving letter, however, makes no note of a Shakespeare connection: he knew the goodness of the vines from his sister-in-law, whose house was nearby.^[3] The revival of interest in the flowers mentioned in Shakespeare's plays arose with the revival of flower gardening in the United Kingdom. An early document is Paul Jerrard, Flowers from Stratford-on-Avon (London 1852), who attempted to identify Shakespeare's floral references, in a purely literary and botanical exercise, such as J. Harvey Bloom, Shakespeare's Garden (London:Methuen 1903) or F.G. Savage, The Flora and Folk Lore of Shakespeare (Cheltenham:E.J. Burrow) 1923.^[4] This parallel industry continues today.

The major Shakespeare garden is that imaginatively reconstructed by Ernest Law at New Place in the 1920s. He used a woodcut from Thomas Hill, The Gardiners Labyrinth (London 1586), noting in his press coverage when the garden was in planning stage, that it was "a book Shakespeare must certainly have consulted when laying out his own Knott Garden"^[5] The same engraving was used in laying out the Queen's Garden behind Kew Palace in 1969. Ernest Law's, Shakespeare's Garden, Stratford-upon-Avon (1922), with photographic illustrations showing quartered plats in patterns outlined by green and gray clipped edgings, each centered by roses grown as standards, must have supplied impetus to many flower-filled revivalist Shakespeare's gardens of the 20s and 30s. For Americans, Esther Singleton produced The Shakespeare Garden (New York, 1931).^[6] Singleton's and Law's plantings, as with most Shakespeare gardens, owed a great deal to the bountiful esthetic of the partly-revived but largely invented "English cottage garden" tradition dating from the 1870s.^[7] Few attempts were made in revived garden plans to keep strictly to historical plants, until the National Trust led the way in the 1970s with a knot garden at Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire, and the restored parterre at Hampton Court Palace (1977).^[8]

An early Shakespeare garden was added in the anniversary year 1916 to Central Park, New York City. It included a graft from a mulberry tree said to have been grafted from one planted by Shakespeare in 1602; that tree was cut down by Rev. Francis Gastrell, owner of New Place, however^[9] The tree blew down in a summer storm in 2006 and was removed. This garden is located near the Delacorte Theater that houses the New York Shakespeare Festival, but it no longer contains plants mentioned in Shakespeare's plays.

The conventions of Shakespeare Gardens were familiar enough in the 1920s that E.F. Benson sets the opening of Mapp and Lucia (1931) in the not-quite-recently widowed Lucia's "Perdita's Garden" at Riseholme, in words that epitomize Benson's dry touch:

"Perdita's garden requires a few words of explanation. It was a charming little square plot in front of the timbered façade of the Hurst, surrounded by yew-hedges and intersected with paths of crazy pavement, carefully smothered in stone-crop, which led to the Elizabethan sundial from Wardour Street in the centre. It was gay in spring with those flowers (and no others) on which Perdita doted. There were 'violets dim', and primroses and daffodils, which came before the swallow dared and took the winds (usually of April) with beauty.^[10] But now in June the swallow had dared long ago, and when spring and the daffodils were over, Lucia always allowed Perdita's garden a wider, though still strictly Shakespearian scope. There was eglantine (Penzance briar) in full flower now, and honeysuckle and gillyflowers and plenty of pansies for thoughts, and yards of rue (more than usual this year), and so Perdita's garden was gay all the summer.

Here then, this morning, Lucia seated herself by the sundial, all in black, on a stone bench on which was carved the motto 'Come thou north wind, and blow thou south, that my garden spices may flow forth.' Sitting there with Pepino's poems and The Times she obscured about one-third of this text, and fat little Daisy would obscure the rest... "

Shakespeare's flora

The best known reference in Shakespeare of plants used for symbolic purposes, aside from passing mention, as in Romeo and Juliet, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."^[11]] is Ophelia's speech from Hamlet:

Ophelia: There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love,

remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.

Laertes: A document in madness! Thoughts and remembrance fitted.

Ophelia: There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you,

and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays.

O, you must wear your rue with a difference! There's a daisy. I

would give you some violets, but they wither'd all when my father

died. They say he made a good end.^[12]

Shakespeare also uses plants for historic symbolism, such as the plucking of red and white roses in Henry VI, Part I to foreshadow the dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses that would end the king's reign. All the plants Shakespeare names in his plays are mentioned in classical medical texts or medieval herbal manuals.^[13]

List of Shakespeare gardens

Notes

Bibliography

• The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare by Rev. Henry N. Ellacombe (second Edition 1884, out of print)
• Shakespeare's Wild Flowers: Fairy Lore, Gardens, Herbs, Gatherers of Simples and Bee Lore by Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (London: The Medici Society, LTD. Great Britain 1985)
• Shakespeare's Flowers by Jessica Kerr (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, 1969)
• Fantastic Garlands: An Anthology of Flowers and Plants from Shakespeare by Lys de Bray (Blandford Press: Poole, Dorset 1982)
• The Shakespeare Garden by Esther Singleton (William Farquhar Payson, New York, 1922, out of print)
• The Flowers of Shakespeare by Doris Hunt (Webb & Bower Exeter, England, 1980)
• The Renaissance Garden In England by Sir Roy Strong (Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1979, republished 1998)

External links

• "Shakespeare's Garden," an online quiz
• Images and quotations from a Shakespeare garden in San Jose, California
• List of quotations from Purdue University
• "The Shakespeare Garden: Plants in Shakespeare’s Works" by Penny Duchene-Carson, Colorado State University
• Northwestern University Shakespeare Garden, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, Illinois

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