360 THE GARDEN-CRAFT OF SHAKESPEARE 
of flowers, is a product of the nineteenth century. But the 
love of flowers is no new taste in Englishmen, and the science 
of horticulture is in no way a modern science. We have 
made large progress in botanical science during the present 
century, and our easy communications with the whole habit¬ 
able globe have brought to us thousands of new and beautiful 
plants in endless varieties ; and we have many helps in garden¬ 
ing that were quite unknown to our forefathers. Yet there 
were brave old gardeners in our forefathers’ times, and a very 
little acquaintance with the literature of the sixteenth century 
will show that in Shakespeare’s time there was a most healthy 
and manly love of flowers for their own sake, and great industry 
and much practical skill in gardening. We might, indeed, go 
much further back than the fifteenth century, and still find the 
same love and the same skill. We have long lists of plants 
grown in times before the Conquest, with treatises on garden¬ 
ing, in which there is much that is absurd, but which show 
that the gardens of those days were by no means ill-furnished 
either with fruit or flowers. Coming a little later, Chaucer 
takes every opportunity to speak with a most loving affection 
for flowers, both wild and cultivated, and for well-kept gar¬ 
dens ; and Spenser’s poems show a familiar acquaintance with 
them, and a warm admiration for them. Then in Shake¬ 
speare’s time we have full records of the gardens and gar¬ 
dening which must have often met his eye; and we find that 
they were not confined to a few fine places here and there, 
but that good gardens were the necessary adjunct to every 
country house, and that they were cultivated with a zeal and 
a skill that would be a credit to any gardener of our own 
day. In Harrison’s description of “ England in Shakespeare’s 
Youth,” recently published by the New Shakspere Society, 
we find that Harrison himself, though only a poor country 
parson, “took pains with his garden, in which, though its 
area covered but 300 ft. of ground, there are very near three 
hundred of simples of one sort and another contained therein, 
no one of them being common or usually to be had.” About 
the same time Gerard’s Catalogues show that he grew in his 
