The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespear by Henry Nicholson Ellacombe (top 20 books to read txt) 📖

The Musk Roses (No. 1) were great favourites with our forefathers. This Rose (R. moschata) is a native of the North of Africa and of Spain, and has been also found in Nepaul. Hakluyt gives the exact date of its introduction. "The turkey cockes and hennes," he says, "were brought about fifty yeres past, the Artichowe in time of King Henry the Eight, and of later times was procured out of Italy the Muske Rose plant, the Plumme called the Perdigwena, and two kindes more by the Lord Cromwell after his travel."—Voiages, vol. ii. It is a long straggling Rose, bearing bunches of single flowers, and is very seldom seen except against the walls of some old houses. "You remember the great bush at the corner of the south wall just by the blue drawing-room windows; that is the old Musk Rose, Shakespeare's Musk Rose, which is dying out through the kingdom now."—My Lady Ludlow, by Mrs. Gaskell. But wherever it is grown it is highly prized, not so much for the beauty as for the delicate scent of its flowers. The scent is unlike the scent of any other Rose, or of any other flower, but it is very pleasant, and not overpowering; and the plant has the peculiarity that, like the Sweet Briar, but unlike other Roses, it gives out its scent of its own accord and unsought, and chiefly in the evening, so that if the window of a bedroom near which this rose is trained is left open, the scent will soon be perceived in the room. This peculiarity did not escape the notice of Lord Bacon. "Because the breath of flowers," he says, "is far sweeter in the air (when it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air. Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells, so that you may walk by a whole row of them, and find nothing of their sweetness, yea, though it be in a morning's dew. Bays, likewise, yield no smell as they grow, Rosemary little, nor Sweet Marjoram; that which above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air is the Violet, especially the white double Violet which comes twice a year, about the middle of April, and about Bartholomew-tide; next to that is the Musk-rose."—Essay of Gardens.

The Roses mentioned in Nos. 34, 51, and 52 as a mixture of red and white must have been the mottled or variegated Roses, commonly called the York and Lancaster Roses;[253:1] these are old Roses, and very probably quite as old as the sixteenth century. There are two varieties: in one each petal is blotched with white and pink; this is the R. versicolor of Parkinson, and is a variety of R. Damascena; in the other most of the petals are white, but with a mixture of pink petals; this is the Rosa mundi or Gloria mundi, and is a variety of R. Gallica.

These, with the addition of the Eglantine or Sweet Brier (see Eglantine), are the only Roses that Shakespeare directly names, and they were the chief sorts grown in his time, but not the only sorts; and to what extent Roses were cultivated in Shakespeare's time we have a curious proof in the account of the grant of Ely Place, in Holborn, the property of the Bishops of Ely. "The tenant was Sir Christopher Hatton (Queen Elizabeth's handsome Lord Chancellor) to whom the greater portion of the house was let in 1576 for the term of twenty-one years. The rent was a Red Rose, ten loads of hay, and ten pounds per annum; Bishop Cox, on whom this hard bargain was forced by the Queen, reserving to himself and his successors the right of walking in the gardens, and gathering twenty bushels of Roses yearly."—Cunningham. We have records also of the garden cultivation of the Rose in London long before Shakespeare's time. "In the Earl of Lincoln's garden in Holborn in 24 Edw. I., the only flowers named are Roses, of which a quantity was sold, producing three shillings and twopence."—Hudson Turner.

My space forbids me to enter more largely into any account of these old species, or to say much of the many very interesting points in the history of the Rose, but two or three points connected with Shakespeare's Roses must not be passed over. First, its name. He says through Juliet (No. 36) that the Rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But the whole world is against him. Rose was its old Latin name corrupted from its older Greek name, and the same name, with slight and easily-traced differences, has clung to it in almost all European countries.

Shakespeare also mentions its uses in Rose-water and Rose-cakes, and it was only natural to suppose that a flower so beautiful and so sweet was meant by Nature to be of great use to man. Accordingly we find that wonderful virtues were attributed to it,[255:1] and an especial virtue was attributed to the dewdrops that settled on the full-blown Rose. Shakespeare alludes to these in Nos. 22 and 27; and from these were made cosmetics only suited to the most extravagant.