18 GARDENS OF ENGLAND 



nor even naturalised. The home of both one and 

 the other is in the countries bordering on the 

 Mediterranean shore, where they are happy in 

 torrid sunshine and dry rocky soil. Nor is there 

 any special mention of them as known in England 

 before the middle of the sixteenth century, when 

 rosemary and southernwood, and, twenty years 

 later, lavender — reputed to have come in with 

 Good Queen Bess — found their way into the 

 physic gardens of the time. For this reason, and 

 perhaps incited thereto by imaginative writers, we 

 have accustomed ourselves in thought to associate 

 the hoary grey of lavender with the terraces of 

 stately Elizabethan architecture, yet it must then 

 have been a plant of some rarity, though Parkinson, 

 some seventy years later, could speak of it as 

 " our ordinary garden lavender." At that date the 

 dwarf species was evidently in greater favour, for 

 in the later edition of Gerarde's Herball, revised by 

 Thomas Johnson, we find it stated that there is 

 "in our English gardens, a small kind of Lavander, 

 which is altogether lesser than the other [and the 

 floures are of a more purple colour, and grow in 

 much lesse and shorter heads ; yet have they a far 

 more gratefull smell : the leaves are also lesse and 

 whiter than those of the ordinarie sort. This did. 



