GARDENS OF CELEBRITIES 
Then, walking beneath his tower, he espies the maiden and thus 
apostrophizes her : 
‘“* Ah sweet ! are ye a worldly creature 
Or heavenly thing in likeness of nature ? 
‘“* Or are ye God Cupides own princess 
And comin are to loose me out of band ? 
Or are ye very Nature the goddess 
That have depainted with yr heavenly hand 
This garden full of flowers as they stand ? ” 
The medieval ‘‘ arbour” here referred to, according to W. C. 
Hazlitt, was not a summer-house as we understand it, but a 
garden within a garden, sufficiently large to enclose great trees. 
He quotes in support of this statement the ancient rhyme : 
“* And in the garden, as I weene 
Was an arbour fair and greene ; 
And in the arbour was a tree, 
A fairer in the world might never be.” 
In the King’s poem before quoted, however, the word “ arbour ” 
is so used as to convey much of its present meaning—a meaning 
which it had indisputably acquired at the beginning of the 
sixteenth century. 
So early as the first century after Christ the English climate had 
been eulogized by Tacitus as favourable to the cultivation of all 
vegetables and fruits except the vine and the olive. Therefore, 
it is not surprising to find that melons, cucumbers, and many of 
the more expensive products of the kitchen garden were common 
in England as early as the reign of Edward III. But the Wars 
of the Roses interrupted agriculture, and these vegetables after- 
wards were unknown, until the reign of Henry VIII., when the 
art of gardening came to a new birth. 
There was for some time a curious prejudice against hops, and 
in the reign of Henry VI. Parliament was petitioned against the 
‘“ wicked weed.” But in 1576 Reginald Scott published a pamphlet 
entitled, ‘“‘ The Perfect Platform of a Hoppe Garden.” 
Potatoes were not in common use before the middle of the 
seventeenth century. A writer in the ‘‘ Topographical Antiquities 
of Great Britain and Ireland” in 1753, though himself of opinion 
that Sir Walter Raleigh brought them over, remarks that “ the 
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