The Kitchen- Gar den. 55 



vegetable or herb. In ort one recognises the 

 Latin hortus ; but the Romans gave to the 

 locality the name which our ancestors bestowed 

 on the produce. Our word garden, which 

 used to be understood of a series of en- 

 closures and plantations for various purposes, 

 as the apple-yard, the ash-yard (where the 

 ash for hop-poles was grown), the ort-yard, 

 and the vine-yard, looks like the plural of 

 geard ; and this notion is confirmed by the 

 northern form garth, and apple-garth for 

 apple-yard. 1 The French jardin is evidently 

 from the same root. In the Privy Purse 

 Expenses of Henry VII., under 1493, we come 

 across the term coney-garth, which seems to 

 be a place for keeping rabbits, rather than, as 

 the editor explains, a rabbit-warren, particu- 

 larly as the charge is for a coney-garth pale. 

 The leek was universally cultivated, and 



1 Mr. Lucas, in his Studies in Nidderland, devotes 

 a section to an etymological essay on Garth and its 

 allied meanings in sundry northern languages. 



But he does not note the application of the plural to 

 form a collective phrase. Yard and garth are abso- 

 lutely the same word ; and Mr. Lucas specifies many 

 other variations in other dialects. 



