SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
15 * 
that in Troilus and Cressida , V. ii. 193, in the form of 
a proverb : 
The parrot will not do more for an almond. 
But Shakespeare’s contemporaries mention it freely, 
thus : “ The blooms of the almond-tree grow in a 
night and vanish in a morn ” (Greene’s “ Friar 
Bacon ”). 
And again : 
Bright Bathsabe shall wash in David’s bower 
In water mix’d with purest almond flower. 
Peele : Love of King David, 1599. 
Almonds were used in Elizabethan times in the 
manufacture of marchpanes—the prototypes either 
of macaroons or the Italian marzipan : 
Save me a piece of marchpane. 
Romeo and Juliet , I. v. 9. 
If we turn for a while from trees to shrubs, and 
search the hedgebanks, we cannot help thinking of 
Tennyson’s beautiful lines : 
The meadows your walks have left so sweet 
That whenever a March wind sighs 
It sets the jewel-print of your feet 
In violets blue as your eyes. 
It matters little; the violet, with its delicious 
colour and scent, its coy half-revealed, half-hidden 
habit, appeals not only to the poet, but to the most 
untutored clod that ever was born on Midland clay, 
and William Shakespeare was no exception. In 
eighteen separate passages this flower is quoted, and 
always with a tender poet’s love. 
Several of these passages are too beautiful to miss. 
First for the violet’s catholicity : 
I think the king is but a man, as I am ; the violet smells to 
him as it doth to me. 
Henry V., IV. i. 105. 
