PART II 
THE GARDEN-CRAFT OF SHAKESPEARE 
The flowers are sweet, the colours fresh and trim. 
Vemis and Adonis. 
“Retired Leisure 
That in trim Gardens takes his pleasure.” 
Milton, II Penseroso. 
NY account of the “ Plant-lore of Shakespeare ” 
would be very incomplete if it did not include 
his “ Garden-craft.” There are a great many 
passages scattered throughout his works, some 
of them among the most beautiful that he ever 
wrote, in which no particular tree, herb, or 
flower is mentioned by name, but which show his intimate 
knowledge of plants and gardening, and his great affection for 
them. It is from these passages, even more than from the 
passages I have already quoted, in which particular flowers 
are named, that we learn how thoroughly his early country life 
had influenced and marked his character, and how his whole 
spirit was most naturally coloured by it. Numberless allusions 
to flowers and their culture prove that his boyhood and early 
manhood were spent in the country, and that as he passed 
through the parks, fields, and lanes of his native county, or 
spent pleasant days in the gardens and orchards of the manor- 
houses and farm-houses of the neighbourhood, his eyes and 
* ears were open to all the sights and sounds of a healthy 
country life, and he was, perhaps unconsciously, laying up in 
his memory a goodly store of pleasant pictures and homely 
355 
