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 Historie 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, 
6 
