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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