SHAKESPEARE'S GARDEN 83 
Another fruit worth considering is the fig, men¬ 
tioned in the continuation of the last lines, 
With purple grapes, green figs and mulberries, 
and in eleven other places. The most interesting 
are the following : 
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig .—King John , II. i. 162. 
Here is a rural fellow 
That will not be denied your highness’s presence; 
He brings you figs .—Antony and Cleopatra , V. ii. 233. 
I’ll pledge you all, and a fig for Peter. 
2 Henry VI ., II. iii. 66. 
Many other of the quotations are a reference to 
an insulting and indecent gesture called “ making 
the fig,” which we cannot enter upon. 
The fig* itself is a tree with handsome palmately- 
lobed leaves of curious texture and a very peculiar 
flower usually called the fruit. It is what botanists call 
a hypanthodium; i.e. } the end of the flower-stalk is 
hollowed out, and the flowers grow within it. Its 
introduction has been attributed to the Romans ; it 
certainly was grown at Lambeth by Cardinal Pole. 
The curious word “ coloquintida ” is used in Othello 
in the line (I. iii. 354) : 
The food that to him now is as luscious as locusts 
Shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida. 
The word of which colocynth is a synonym was 
applied in Shakespeare’s day to a drug well known 
to the apothecaries, and prepared from the dried 
fruit of Cucumis colocynthis , a native of Turkey, 
which Gerard may have grown in his London 
garden, though it is not quite certain. Our only 
native member of the order to which gourds, 
cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, and vegetable 
marrows belong is the poisonous black bryony 
* Ficus carica, L. 
6—2 
