8 4 
SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
(Bryonia dioica, L.), whose long trailing stems, with 
their dainty cucumber-like leaves and greenish-white 
flowers, smother the plants by which they have 
climbed into sunlight, and in autumn festoon them in 
garlands of berries, red, green, and orange. This 
plant in Shakespeare’s birthplace garden is labelled 
“ Mandrake.” Prior says the roots of it were cut to 
the shape of men and women, and dried in a hot 
sand-bath, and thus sold by fraudulent dealers. It 
is certain the English plant is not the “ mandrake ” 
of the poet. The pumpion is also mentioned once. 
Since it belongs to the same natural order, we may 
deal with it here. It is in The Merry Wives of 
Windsor , III. iii. 42, and Falstaff is the person 
referred to : 
Go to, then: we’ll use this unwholesome humidity, this 
gross watery pumpion. 
It is probably not the pumpkin of our modern 
gardens, which is useful both for food and in pre¬ 
serve, but one of the large useless gourds grown even 
then as ornamental plants. Of this group Gerard says: 
“ The gourd groweth into any forme or fashion 
you would have it . . . being suffered to clime 
upon an arbour where the fruit may hang; it hath 
beene seen to be nine foot long.” He says they are 
used to “cure copper faces, red and shining fierce 
noses with pimples, pumples, rubies, and such-like 
precious faces.” It is true that he speaks of the 
cucumber, but his words may be extended. Gerard 
figures the cucumber pompion, apparently our veget¬ 
able-marrow, and a variety which is now our custard 
marrow, and of which he says : “It maketh a man 
apt and ready to fall into the disease called colericke 
passion, and of some the felonie.” 
Among the umbel-bearing plants this month 
comes the aromatic fennel, with its curious smooth. 
