A Shakespeare garden is a themed garden that cultivates some or all of the 175 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.
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.
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. [1] 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), in which Jerrard attempted to identify Shakespeare's floral references, in a purely literary and botanical exercise, such as those by 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). [2] This parallel industry continues today.
A small arboretum of some forty trees mentioned by Shakespeare was planted in 1988 to complement the garden of Anne Hathaway's Cottage in Shottery, a mile from Stratford-on-Avon. "Visitors can sit on the specially designed bench, gaze at the cottage, press a button and listen to one of four Shakespearean sonnets read by famous actors," the official website informs the prospective visitor. [3] A live willow cabin made of growing willows, inspired by lines in Twelfth Night, [4] is another feature, and a maze of yew.
The major Shakespeare garden is that imaginatively reconstructed by Ernest Law at New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, 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 the 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 grey clipped edgings, each centred 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 aesthetic 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]
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 epitomise 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. [9]
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 grew up in a small town with gardens, surrounded by meadow, river and woodlands. His references to trees, herbs, kitchen and flower garden plants are correct botanically, and are a source for plants' names and uses in Elizabethan times. English ships exploring the New World brought back new plants to join the local ones being designed for estates or in the kitchen garden outside the tradeswoman's door. The Elizabethans gave symbolic meaning to certain plants, as Ophelia's speech (below) illustrates. Shakespeare uses individual plants, gardens, gardening knowledge and skills (e.g. pruning), forests and other landscapes to describe character and place, set or shift tone and mood, make allusions perhaps that in prose would prove politically dangerous.[ citation needed ]
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." [10] 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. [11]
Shakespeare devotes five History plays Henry VI, Part 1, 2, 3; Richard III, Henry VIII to the Wars of the Roses which lasted from 1455 to 1485. This dynastic struggle between two houses (York and Lancaster) was resolved when Henry VII married Elizabeth of York, and founded the Tudor dynasty. Shakespeare uses the historic symbolism of the Red Rose of Lancaster, the White Rose of York, and ends this sequence of plays in Richard III (V,5,19) with the line "We will unite the white rose and the red." That union is the Tudor Rose with its white and red petals.
All the plants Shakespeare names in his plays are mentioned in classical medical texts or medieval herbal manuals. [12]
An early Shakespeare garden was added in the anniversary year 1916 [13] to Central Park, New York City. In honour of the Bard and the reading of literature, this area is one of eight designated Quiet Zones. [14]
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 [15] 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. According to information available on the Central Park web pages, the Shakespeare Garden there does still contain some of the flowers and plants mentioned in his plays.
The rich weave of associations engendered by Shakespeare Gardens is exemplified in the Shakespeare Garden of Cleveland, Ohio, [16] where herb-bordered paths, converge on a bust of Shakespeare. The requisite mulberry tree was from a cutting sent by the critic Sir Sidney Lee, a slip said to be from the mulberry at New Place. Elms were planted by E. H. Sothen and Julia Marlowe, oaks by William Butler Yeats, and a circular bed of roses sent by the mayor of Verona, from the traditional tomb of Juliet, planted by Phyllis Neilson Terry, niece of Ellen Terry. Birnam Wood was represented by sycamore maples from Scotland. The sundial was Byzantine, presented by the Shakespearean actor, Robert Mantell. Jars planted with ivy and flowers were sent by Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Rabindranath Tagore— as the "Shakespeare of India"— and Sarah Bernhardt.
The Shakespeare Garden inaugural exercises took place on April 14th, 1916, the tercentenary year... E. H. Sothen and Julia Marlowe were guests of honor. After speeches of welcome by city officials and Mayor Harry L. Davis, the orchestra played selections from Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream," and the Normal School Glee Club sang choral setting of "Hark, Hark, the Lark" and "Who Is Sylvia?" A group of high school pupils in Elizabethan costume escorted the guests to the garden entrance and stood guard during the planting of the dedicatory elms.... Miss Marlowe climaxed the proceedings by her readings of Perdita's flower scene from A Winter's Tale, the 54th Sonnet of Shakespeare, and verses from the Star Spangled Banner. Her leading of all present in the singing of the National Anthem brought the impressive event to a close." [16]
In later years the Cleveland Shakespeare Garden continued to be enriched at every Shakespearean occasion. Willows flanking the fountain were planted by William Faversham and Daniel Frohman. Vachel Lindsay planted a poplar and recited his own Shakespeare tribute. Novelist Hugh Walpole also planted a tree. Aline Kilmer, widow of the soldier poet, Joyce Kilmer, made a visit in 1919, and the actor, Otis Skinner and the humorist, Stephen Leacock. David Belasco came to plant two junipers.
The Colorado Shakespeare Garden [17] is a Public Garden founded in 1991 by herbalist Marlene Cowdrey. Eight gardens line a courtyard on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder, Colorado. The gardens are placed near to the WPA built Mary Rippon Theatre, which is the major performance space for the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. [18] The gardens are: Founder's, Kitchen, War of the Roses, Midsummer Night's Dream, Knot, Canon, Elizabethan, and a Highlight garden featuring each performance season's plants. Members of the Colorado Shakespeare Gardens are volunteers interested in gardens or Shakespeare or both. They research, design, plant, and maintain the gardens with oversight from CU. The various gardens are designed to display Elizabethan gardening techniques as well as feature plants. There is an audio-visual tour.
This section's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines.(August 2023) |
Location | Site | Reference |
---|---|---|
Bethel Public Library, Bethel, Connecticut | Public park or botanical garden | |
Brookfield Shakespeare's Garden, Brookfield, Connecticut | Public park or botanical garden | |
Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, Brooklyn, New York | Public park or botanical garden | |
Misericordia University | University or college campus | |
Evanston, Illinois | Public park or botanical garden | |
Cleveland, Ohio | Public park or botanical garden Daphne High School Daphne, Alabama Created by Agricultural Dept., 2021 | |
Johannesburg Botanical Garden, South Africa | Public park or botanical garden | |
Central Park, New York City | Public park, Shakespeare festival | |
International Rose Test Garden, Portland, Oregon | Public park or botanical garden | |
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California | Public park or botanical garden | |
The Huntington, San Marino, California | Public park or botanical garden | |
Vienna, Austria | Public park or botanical garden | |
Herzogspark, Regensburg, Germany | Public park or botanical garden | |
Hilltop Garden and Nature Center at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN | University or college campus | |
Moraine Valley Community College, Palos Hills, IL | University or College Campus | |
Illinois State University | University or college campus | |
Kilgore College | University or college campus | |
Naugatuck Valley Community College, Waterbury | University or college campus | |
Northwestern University | University or college campus | |
St. Norbert College | University or college campus | |
Susquehanna University | University or college campus | |
University College of the Fraser Valley | University or college campus | |
University of Massachusetts | University or college campus | |
The University of the South | University or college campus | |
University of South Dakota | University campus | |
Vassar College | University or college campus | |
Blount Cultural Park of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival | Shakespeare festival | |
Colorado Shakespeare Festival | Shakespeare festival | |
Illinois Shakespeare Festival | Shakespeare festival | |
Elizabethan Garden, Folger Shakespeare Library | Public park or botanical garden | |
The Elizabethan Herb Garden, Mellon Park, Pittsburgh, PA | Public park or botanical garden | |
The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga | University campus | |
Shakespeare Garden in Cedar Brook Park, Plainfield, NJ | Public park or botanical garden. Operated by the Union County Park system, it was established in 1927. The Garden appears on the National Register of Historic Places. | |
Dunedin Botanic Garden, New Zealand | Public park or botanical garden. | |
Shakespeare Garden in Stanley Park, Vancouver, BC, Canada | Public park or botanical garden | [19] |
Shakespearian Garden in Wagga Wagga Botanic Gardens, Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, Australia. | Public park or botanical garden | [20] |
Stratford-upon-Avon, commonly known as just Stratford, is a market town and civil parish in the Stratford-on-Avon district, in the county of Warwickshire, in the West Midlands region of England. It is situated on the River Avon, 91 miles (146 km) north-west of London, 22 miles (35 km) south-east of Birmingham and 8 miles (13 km) south-west of Warwick. The town is the southernmost point of the Arden area at the northern extremity of the Cotswolds. In the 2021 census Stratford had a population of 30,495.
Anne Hathaway's Cottage is a twelve-roomed farmhouse where Anne Hathaway, the wife of William Shakespeare, lived as a child in the village of Shottery, Warwickshire, England, about 1 mile (1.6 km) west of Stratford-upon-Avon. Spacious, and with several bedrooms, it is now set in extensive gardens.
Floriography is a means of cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers. Meaning has been attributed to flowers for thousands of years, and some form of floriography has been practiced in traditional cultures throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa.
William Robinson: was an Irish practical gardener and journalist whose ideas about wild gardening spurred the movement that led to the popularising of the English cottage garden, a parallel to the search for honest simplicity and vernacular style of the British Arts and Crafts movement, and were important in promoting the woodland garden. Robinson is credited as an early practitioner of the mixed herbaceous border of hardy perennial plants, a champion too of the "wild garden", who vanquished the high Victorian pattern garden of planted-out bedding schemes. Robinson's new approach to gardening gained popularity through his magazines and several books—particularly The Wild Garden, illustrated by Alfred Parsons, and The English Flower Garden.
Garden design is the art and process of designing and creating plans for layout and planting of gardens and landscapes. Garden design may be done by the garden owner themselves, or by professionals of varying levels of experience and expertise. Most professional garden designers have some training in horticulture and the principles of design. Some are also landscape architects, a more formal level of training that usually requires an advanced degree and often a state license. Amateur gardeners may also attain a high level of experience from extensive hours working in their own gardens, through casual study, serious study in Master gardener programs, or by joining gardening clubs.
New Place was William Shakespeare's final place of residence in Stratford-upon-Avon. He died there in 1616. The whole building was demolished in 1702 by Sir John Clopton, who replaced it with a modern-style house, also called New Place. This in turn was demolished by Francis Gastrell, vicar of Frodsham, Cheshire, in 1759. It was never rebuilt after the second demolition and only the foundations remain.
The Christchurch Botanic Gardens, located in the central city of Christchurch, New Zealand, were founded in 1863 when an English oak was planted to commemorate the solemnisation of the marriage of Prince Albert and Princess Alexandra of Denmark. The gardens sprawl over an area of 21 hectares and lie adjacent to the loop of the Avon River next to Hagley Park. The Christchurch Botanic Gardens have a variety of collections of exotic and local plants of New Zealand, several conservatories, a nursery, playground and Climatological Station.
The cottage garden is a distinct style that uses informal design, traditional materials, dense plantings, and a mixture of ornamental and edible plants. English in origin, it depends on grace and charm rather than grandeur and formal structure. Homely and functional gardens connected to cottages go back centuries, but their stylized reinvention occurred in 1870s England, as a reaction to the more structured, rigorously maintained estate gardens with their formal designs and mass plantings of greenhouse annuals.
The Reeves-Reed Arboretum is a nonprofit arboretum and garden located at 165 Hobart Avenue in Summit, Union County, New Jersey, United States. It is the only arboretum in Union County. A popular wedding spot, the arboretum grounds are open daily from dawn till dusk, free of charge.
Calvin Hoffman, born Leo Hochman in Brooklyn, New York, was an American theater critic, press agent and writer who popularized in his 1955 book The Man Who Was Shakespeare the Marlovian theory that playwright Christopher Marlowe was the actual author of the works attributed to William Shakespeare. Like other alternate Shakespearean authorship theories, Hoffman's claims have been largely dismissed by mainstream Shakespearean scholars.
This is an alphabetical index of articles related to gardening.
The Marlovian theory of Shakespeare authorship holds that the Elizabethan poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe was the main author of the poems and plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Further, the theory says Marlowe did not die in Deptford on 30 May 1593, as the historical records state, but that his death was faked.
Luddington is a small village and civil parish in the English county of Warwickshire and is part of Stratford-on-Avon district. The community is a conservation area due to its historic aspects. In 2001, the population was 457, increasing to 515 at the 2021 census. It is located about 5 kilometres outside the town of Stratford-upon-Avon on the banks of the river Avon and has views south over the Cotswolds. Facilities and communications include a phone box, a 19th-century church, a post box, a marina with a 17th-century lock, a village green and a recently refurbished village hall originally built in 1953. The parish encompasses Dodwell Caravan Park to the north of the village. The village is reputed to be the meeting place of Anne Hathaway and William Shakespeare, as Anne was from the parish, and local lore states that they probably conducted their courtship in the area.
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) is an independent registered educational charity based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England, that came into existence in 1847 following the purchase of William Shakespeare's birthplace for preservation as a national memorial. It can also lay claim to be the oldest conservation society in Britain. Receiving no government funding or public subsidies, it is totally dependent upon the public for support, and relies on donations and the income generated from visitors.
William Shakespeare has been commemorated in a number of different statues and memorials around the world, notably his funerary monument in Stratford-upon-Avon ; a statue in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, London, designed by William Kent and executed by Peter Scheemakers (1740); and a statue in New York's Central Park by John Quincy Adams Ward (1872).
The White Lion Inn was a public house located in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon, England, an example of Elizabethan architecture that first appears in historical records in 1591. The building was mentioned by both Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rupert Graves.
Ophelia is a character in William Shakespeare's drama Hamlet (1599–1601). She is a young noblewoman of Denmark, the daughter of Polonius, sister of Laertes and potential wife of Prince Hamlet, who, due to Hamlet's actions, ends up in a state of madness that ultimately leads to her drowning.
Ellen Ann Willmott was an English horticulturist. She was an influential member of the Royal Horticultural Society, and a recipient of the first Victoria Medal of Honour, awarded to British horticulturists living in the UK by the society, in 1897. Willmott was said to have cultivated more than 100,000 species and cultivars of plants and sponsored expeditions to discover new species. Inherited wealth allowed Willmott to buy large gardens in France and Italy to add to the garden at her home, Warley Place in Essex. More than 60 plants have been named after her or her home, Warley Place.
James Harvey Bloom was an English clergyman and antiquary.
A Shakespeare festival is a theatre organization that stages the works of William Shakespeare continually.
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes
Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phœbus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maids; bold oxlips and
The crown imperial; lilies of all kinds." (The Winter's Tale, IV,4)
Media related to Shakespeare gardens at Wikimedia Commons