94 
SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
From the assumption that St. John the Baptist 
ate these beans, the tree obtained its name of St. 
John’s beans and St. John’s bread. 
The herb-garden provides two subjects for our pen 
this month, the lavender and wormwood. The 
former is referred to but once, in a passage from The 
Winter's Tale, IV. iv. 103, already quoted: 
Here’s flowers for you ; 
Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram ; 
but it is not unknown to other Elizabethan play- 
writers. Thus, we have : “ Then she’ll put thee into 
her chest and lay thee into lavender” (Greene’s 
4 ‘ Friar Bacon,” 1594). 
The plant itself (Lavendula officinalis, L.) is a native 
of Southern Europe, and was known, though not too 
frequently, to Elizabethan gardeners. 
To-day it is very popular. Its sweet-scented 
flowers, dried and twisted with ribbons, are made 
into “ lavender pokers,” and used to scent linen and 
houses. From the essential oil the well-known 
scent is prepared, and it is extensively grown with 
this object about Mitcham in Surrey and at Car- 
shalton. The flower belongs to the order Labiate. 
Its name is derived. Prior says (p. 133), from the 
German lavendel, Middle Latin lavendula, to wash ; 
hence our word 44 laundress,’’ because it was used to 
scent freshly-washed clothes. A sprig of lavender was 
carried to church by peasant girls in clean white print 
dresses, fastened in the knotted handkerchief which 
held their service-books until living memory. How 
differently they looked in those early nineteenth- 
century Sundays to the hideous colours and cheap, 
ill-fitting finery with which they deck themselves in 
the twentieth. 
Along our banks and waste places we shall be sure 
to find the grayish, deep-cut foliage and curious* 
