SHAKESPEARE'S GARDEN 109 
mandy, from which we get our English “medlar.” 
It was, however, more used for medicine than for 
food in the time of Shakespeare ; and in speaking 
as he does contemptuously, playing on the word and 
alternating it with the epithet “rotten,” we seem 
to be feeling the pulse of contemporary popularity. 
The best example, perhaps, is that in As You 
Like It , III. ii. 122 : 
Touch . Truly, the tree yields bad fruit. 
Ros. I’ll graft it with you, and then I shall graff it with 
a medlar : then it will be the earliest fruit i’ the country; 
for you’ll be rotten ere you be half ripe, and that’s the right 
virtue of the medlar. 
Another tree, a handsome and stately one, fruits 
this month—namely, the walnut (Juglans regia , L.), 
a tree of majestic proportions and dense shade, a 
native of the East—Persia and elsewhere—called by 
the Greeks of old “ Persicon,” the Persian, and 
“ Basilikon,” the royal, tree, the Roman people giving 
it the high honour of Jove’s own nut. In the old 
English vocabularies it was “knuta,” the nut, and 
later on “ bannenote-tree,” and then “ walnote-tre. ” 
Lyle calls it “walshe nut tree,” from wilix, a 
foreigner, so that it is only the foreign nut, after all. 
It was a common tree in Shakespeare’s day, especially 
on a chalky soil. It is now prized chiefly for its 
beautiful wood, much in request for gunstocks. In 
the East an oil is extracted from it; it is said to have 
been this oil that was used by Van Eyck and Cor- 
regio in conjunction with amber varnish as a vehicle 
for paint, it drying more slowly than any other 
known oil (quoted by Ellacombe from “ Arts of 
the Middle Ages”). As an antidote for poison it 
was also thought highly of. A recipe attributed 
to Mithridates, King of Pontus, contained “Two 
Nuttesand twoFiggesand twenty Rewe leaves stamped 
