The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare Part 115

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 pa.s.sage would almost tempt us to say that Shakespeare was a gardener by profession; certainly no other pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage 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--

Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant; for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled with excellent endeavour of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant.

_2nd Henry IV_, act iv, sc. 3 (126).

And in the same way Iago says--

Either to have it (a garden) sterile with idleness or manured with industry.

_Oth.e.l.lo_, act i, sc. 3 (296).

Milton and many other writers used the word in this its original sense; and Johnson explains it "to cultivate by manual labour," according to its literal derivation. In one pa.s.sage Shakespeare uses the word somewhat in the modern sense--

_Carlisle._ The blood of English shall manure the ground.

_Richard II_, act iv, sc. 1 (137).

But generally he and the writers of that and the next century expressed the operation more simply and plainly, as "covering with ordure," or as in the English Bible, "I shall dig about it and dung it."

C. GRAFTING.

(1) _Buckingham._

Her royal stock graft with ign.o.ble plants.

_Richard III_, act iii, sc. 7 (127).

(2) _Dauphin._

O Dieu vivant! shall a few sprays of us, The emptying of our fathers' luxury, Our scions, put in wild and savage stock, Spirt up so suddenly into the clouds, And overlook their grafters?

_Henry V_, act iii, sc. 5 (5).

(3) _King._

His plausive words He scatter'd not in ears, but grafted them, To grow there and to bear.

_All's Well that Ends Well_, act i, sc. 2 (53).

(4) _Perdita._

The fairest flowers o' the season Are our Carnations and streak'd Gillyvors, Which some call nature's b.a.s.t.a.r.ds: of that kind Our rustic garden's barren; I care not To get slips of them.

_Polixenes._

Wherefore, gentle maiden, Do you neglect them?

_Perdita._ For I have heard it said There is an art which in their piedness shares With great creating Nature.

_Polixenes._

Say there be; Yet Nature is made better by no mean, But Nature makes that mean: so, over that art Which you say adds to Nature, is an art That Nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry A gentle scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By bud of n.o.bler race: this is an art Which does mend nature, change it rather, but The art itself is nature.

_Perdita._

So it is.

_Polixenes._

Then make your garden rich in Gillyvors, And do not call them b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

_Perdita._

I'll not put The dibble in the earth to set one slip of them.

_Winter's Tale_, act iv, sc. 4 (81).

The various ways of propagating plants by grafts, cuttings, slips, and artificial impregnation (all mentioned in the above pa.s.sages), as used in Shakespeare's day, seem to have been exactly like those of our own time, and so they need no further comment.

FOOTNOTES:

[353:1] The Act 31 Eliz. c. 7, enacts that "noe person shall within this Realme of England make buylde or erect any Buyldinge or Howsinge . . . .

as a Cottage for habitation . . . . unlesse the same person do a.s.signe and laye to the same Cottage or Buyldinge fower acres of Grounde at the least . . . to be contynuallie occupied and manured therewith." Gerard's Chapter on Vines is headed, "Of the manured Vine."

V.--GARDEN ENEMIES.