AND CELEBRATED GARDENS 



Italy, Denmark, or Bohemia, their environment, in his mental 

 picture of them, is always an English one. The action of The 

 Winter's Tale takes place ostensibly in Bohemia, but Perdita 

 is essentially an English maiden, and the plants she tended are 

 British ones. Therefore, in some of the loveliest lines in English 

 verse, spoken by Shakespeare's sweetest heroine, we find the fact 

 established, that sixty years before Worledge's Manual appeared, 

 if not earlier, the peasant's humble cot, and the yeoman's home- 

 stead, as well as the baron's castle and the royal demesne, had 

 each its own garden-plot. It is, however, pretty certain that up to 

 the fourteenth century, and perhaps even up to the sixteenth, the 

 English garden must everywhere have much resembled a modern 

 kitchen-garden, in which we frequently find the commoner kinds 

 of flowers growing side by side with vegetables. 



The orchard and the garden, until after 1618, were one. The 

 smaller gardens would very much resemble what we now call a 

 ' cabbage patch," and all evidence goes to show that in earlier 

 times, in the ground attached even to lordly residences, herbs 

 designed for culinary uses were allowed to grow up together, side 

 by side with flowers and flowering shrubs. 



From all the foregoing it is clear that long before the seventeenth 

 century the garden played a considerable part in the life of the 

 English people. It would naturally do so, for the houses of the 

 commonalty, especially in towns, were confined, gloomy, and 

 airless. They were badly lit by small, deeply-recessed, heavily- 

 leaded lattice windows, such as are still to be seen in old, thatched, 

 gabled, and half-timbered cottages in some parts of the country- 

 habitations that are deliciously picturesque, but insanitary. Even 

 the larger farm-houses, where the yeomanry dwelt, and the abodes 

 of substantial citizens in town, were dark by reason of their heavily- 

 mullioned windows and thick walls, and also because in cities 

 the streets were narrow, and the upper story of a dwelling com- 

 monly projected beyond the lower, and sometimes almost touched 

 its opposite neighbour, leaving only a narrow strip of sky visible 

 between. Such houses could not be good to live in. Yet the 

 English race has always been ruddy and healthy, the men stal- 

 wart, the women fresh and fair. From this we may infer that 

 not only the country gentry, always addicted to sport, and the 

 peasant who tilled the soil, but the citizen also, lived very much 



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