142 
SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
whistling of the wind, in allusion to its native 
windy heaths. 
Shakespeare alludes to the first two of these 
names in the Tempest , IV. i. 180: 
Tooth’d briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns. 
There is another reference to furze in the same 
play (I. i. 71) : 
Long heath, brown furze. 
It does not seem to me sufficiently clear that there 
was any real distinction in Shakespeare’s day be¬ 
tween goss and furze. Ellacombe quotes the en¬ 
closure of Greenwich Park, where vrises and gorste 
are distinguished, but it is only an English method 
of expressing the usual formula for manorial waste 
common to all early deeds. The heath and waste 
(bruera et campus). There are two other English 
species of the genus— U.gaUii , Planch, and U. nanus , 
Forster, but both are comparatively uncommon. 
One quotation— 
And thy broom groves, 
Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves, 
Being lass-lorn ; 
Tempest , IV. i. 66. 
*—has led to a good deal of misunderstanding. 
It has been suggested to be the common broom, 
growing in clumps sufficiently high to shelter the 
unfortunate bachelor, which it rarely, if ever, does, 
and would scarce be a suitable place to wander in if 
it did. Another far-fetched idea has been that 
birchen groves are meant, and that the name of the 
useful birch broom ” has been applied to the grove 
of living trees from which the twigs are cut; but 
there is no doubt in the writer’s mind that the plant, 
loving the shady retirement of a dusky copse wood, 
