GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 



and practice of horticulture. He recommends the planting of 

 hedges of briars and thorns, and dwells much on the maze, or 

 labyrinth, an example of which we see at Hampton Court. Indeed, 

 in Hills' time no self-respecting horticulturist would have laid 

 out a garden of any importance, without one of these curious 

 places in which to " sport at times." Such treatises, and the 

 various herbals, were written avowedly to advance the science 

 of horticulture ; but there are many accidental allusions to garden- 

 ing and flower-growing in the general literature of the age, which 

 throw valuable .. and illuminating sidelights on the history of 

 gardening in England in the Middle Ages. 



In the chapter on Sion reference is made to Turner and his 

 herbal. Following his lead, in Elizabeth's reign, appeared a notable 

 work, the " Herbal or Historic of Plantes,"by John Gerarde, who, 

 as we shall find when we come to the Chelsea" Physicke Garden," 

 owned the first herb garden in this country. The earliest on' the 

 Continent was that established at Padua. Gerarde's garden was 

 attached to his house in Holborn, and must have been of con- 

 siderable size, since he was able to raise eleven hundred different 

 plants and trees. He was a citizen and surgeon-apothecary of 

 London, and head gardener to Lord Burleigh. 



Nor were medicinal plants and herbs forgotten. They were 

 cultivated by the thrifty dames of the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries in every farm-house, manor house, and baronial hall. 

 Dwelling for the most part, as they did, in country districts where 

 intercommunication between towns, and villages, and outlying 

 hamlets, was painfully slow and difficult, and in an age when the 

 science of medicine was in its infancy, in default of the presence 

 of well-equipped disciples of Esculapius, they were content, to a 

 great extent, to practise the healing art themselves ; and if many 

 of their nostrums, as we find from the herbal literature, were 

 extravagant and absurd, and calculated, according to modern ideas, 

 to do their patients more harm than good, they themselves brought 

 often to the service of humanity if not science and learning at any 

 rate, skill, initiative, and common sense, as well as the wisdom 

 which may be derived from practical experience, and handed 

 down from mother to daughter. But there can be but little doubt 

 that, up to the sixteenth century, we owe the preservation, if not 

 positively the new birth of the science, after the Wars of the Roses, 



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