KITCHEN GARDENING UNDER JAMES I. 143 



and tells how to water them, and give them air and light. 

 Window boxes, too, were used : ' In every window you may 

 make square frames either of lead or of boards well pitched 

 within ; fill them with some rich earth, and plant such flowers 

 or hearbs therein as you like best." For the more shady 

 parts of a room he advises rosemary, sweet-briar, bay, or ger- 

 mander. And " in summer-time," he continues, " your 

 chimney may be trimed with a fine bank of mosse, ... or with 

 orpin, or the white flower called ' everlasting.' And at either 

 end one of your flower or Rosemary pots. . . . You may also 

 hang in the roof and about the sides of the room small pompions 

 or cowcumbers pricked full of barley. . . . You may also 

 plant vines without the walls, which being let in at some 

 quarrels, may run about the sides of your windows, and all 

 over the sealing of your rooms. So may you do with Apricot 

 trees, or other plum trees, spreading them against the sides of 

 your windows." 



This great delight in growing flowers for domestic decora- 

 tion was a marked feature in English life at this period. A 

 Dutch traveller, Levimus Leminius, a physician and a native 

 of Zierikzee, visited England in 1560. He was charmed with 

 English comfort, and thus writes :^ " Their chambers and 

 parlours strawed over with sweete herbes refreshed mee ; — 

 their nosegays finely intermingled with sundry sorts of frag- 

 graunte floures, in their bed chambers and privi rooms with 

 comfortable smell cheered me up and entirely delyghted all 

 my senses." 



^ Translation by Thomas Newton, published in The Touchstone of 

 Complexions, 1581, reprinted in England as Seen by Foreigners, Brench- 

 ley Rye. 



