88 
SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
after and admired in our gardens, the time when the 
Cape provided a vast variety of handsome greenhouse 
species ; but now, alas ! heaths are unpopular. The 
family, almost wanting in the New World, is most 
profusely found in South Africa, but is neither an 
insignificant feature in mass nor in the individual plant 
in our Northern latitudes. In our own islands we 
have five species, three of which, the Cornish, 
Mackay’s, and Mediterranean heaths, are very rare ; 
while the others, the cross and fine leaved, are fairly 
common. But the reading of the only passage in 
which any plant of this group is named leads us to 
suppose an allied plant, Calluna Erica, D.C., is meant. 
The words are generally given: 
Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre 
of barren ground, ling, heath, brown furze, anything. 
Tempest , I. i. 70. 
But some for “ ling ” put “ long ” ; in either case 
Callmia is meant. It is a small plant, of 1 to 2 feet 
in height, with wiry stems and elegant pink bells 
growing spikelike on its short pedicels, and ranges 
over Arctic Europe, Western Siberia, Greenland, the 
Azores, Newfoundland, and very rarely in the United 
States. 
In Gerard’s London garden several heaths found 
a home, and among them, in his “ Herbal,” he 
describes and figures the common heath, with a white 
variety, the greater heath, the crossed and steeple 
heath, and others which he calls Erica baccifera lati- 
folia and tenuifolia (“Herbal,” p. 1146). 
The name “heath” is from the Anglo-Saxon 
“haeth,” a word connected with the Early English 
“ hsetu,” heat, fitly applied to that plant, which a 
few years back was sought after in the East of 
England as fuel, and a trade carried on in ling, 
brought round to the villages in carts. Ling was. 
