PLANT-LORE OF SHAKESPEARE 
353 
I hope that those readers who may have gone with me so far 
have met with some things to interest them, I hope also they 
will agree with me that gardening and the love of flowers is 
not altogether the modern accomplishment that many of our 
gardeners now fancy it to be. Here are two hundred names 
of plants in one writer, and that writer not at all writing on 
horticulture, but only mentioning plants and flowers in the 
most incidental manner as they happened naturally to fall in 
his way. I should doubt if there is any similar instance in 
any modern English writer, and feel very sure that there is 
no such instance in any modern English dramatist. It shows 
how familiar gardens and flowers were to Shakespeare, and 
that he must have had frequent opportunities for observing his 
favourites (for most surely he was fond of flowers), not only 
in their wild and native homes, but in the gardens of farm¬ 
houses and parsonages, country houses, and noblemen’s stately 
pleasaunces. The quotations that I have been able to make 
from the early writers in the ninth and tenth centuries, down 
to gossiping old Gerard, the learned Lord Chancellor Bacon, 
and that excellent old gardener Parkinson, all show the same 
thing, that the love of flowers is no new thing in England, still 
less a foreign fashion, but that it is innate in us, a real instinct, 
that showed itself as strongly in our forefathers as in ourselves ; 
and when we find that such men as Shakespeare and Bacon 
(to mention no others) were almost proud to show their know¬ 
ledge of plants and love of flowers, we can say that such love 
and knowledge is thoroughly manly and English. 
In the inquiry into Shakespeare’s plants I have entered 
somewhat largely into the etymological history of the names. 
I have been tempted into this by the personal interest I feel in 
the history of plant names, and I hope it may not have been 
uninteresting to my readers ; but I do not think this part of 
the subject could have been passed by, for I agree with 
Johnston: “ That there is more interest and as much utility 
in settling the nomenclature of our pastoral bards as that of 
all herbalists and dry-as-dust botanists” (“Botany of the 
Eastern Border”). I have also at times entered into the 
