Yet although there is much that I regret in the
disappearance of past modes of horticulture, there are other fashions which I should not wish to see revived. It can never have been elegant to surround the garden beds with jaw-bones. I am not sure that it was really a good idea to hang bird-cages in the tunnels. I agree with Bacon that the use of coloured sands in flower beds was an artificial and a foolish device. The Tudor garden must have been much defaced by the gimcrack ornaments with which it abounded—fretwork beasts, mirrors, gilt or silver tables or an over-abundance of statues. There must, as at Versailles, have been less and less love given to the flowers themselves.
We are not always aware of how recently our stock of flowers has been enriched. Many of the flowers which are today regarded as " old-fashioned " are of comparatively late importation. We know more or less what were the flowers which Shakespeare grew at New Place. The reconstruction of his garden at Stratford is botanically correct. Out in the orchard he had his mulberry tree which that sour vandal, the Rev. Francis Gastrell, cut down in 1758. In his knot garden he grew roses, lavender, santolina, pansies, sweet briar, love-in-idleness, violets, stocks, foxgloves, sweet williams, snap- dragons, valerian, peonies, poppies, hollyhock, wallflowers, marigolds (" marybuds "), artemesia, rosemary, daffodils, the flower-de-lute or iris, and " lilies of all kinds." Although he speaks more frequently of the rose and lily, I suspect that Shakespeare's favourite flower was the violet, since to it he has devoted 3ne of his loveliest and most observant lines:
"violets dim,
And sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes."
But there are other flowers, familiar to us today, that Shakespeare never saw. The zinnia (which to us seems the most mediaeval of all garden flowers) only reached us from Mexico in 1796. The lovely early irises, the stylosa and the reticulata, are quite recent introduc- tions. Shakespeare can never have seen a cedar, an acacia, a magnolia, a rhododendron, a dahlia, an azalea, a geranium, an aster or a chrysanthemum. It is possible also that he never saw an English lawn, since in his days the " green plots " were almost invariably composed of camomile.
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