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

[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—