SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
I 55 
As early as Turner’s time (1548) the narcissus was 
with us as a garden plant. He says : 
“ Narcissus is of diverse sortes. There is one 
wyth a whyte floure, which groweth plenteously in 
my lorde’s gardine in Syon, and it is called of 
diverse whyte claus tibi.” 
Gerard had twenty-four species in his London 
garden, and speaks of their popularity. Flower 
lovers had “ them all and every of them in the 
London gardens in great abundance.” 
Even in the flower-garden, and that, with our 
modern wealth of foliage plants, few plants are more 
stately in flower and leaf than the Rhubarbs {Rheum), 
One species is popular, and deservedly so, as a spring 
vegetable, but this popularity appears to be of com¬ 
paratively recent growth. Ellacombe tells us 
(p. 256) that its culinary properties are not men¬ 
tioned in 1807, but b}^ 1822 it was largely grown for 
the London market. There seems some little doubt 
as to what species the drug Turkey rhubarb was 
obtained from ; the botanists, apparently, thought it 
came from the plant they called Rheum officinale , 
which is to this day grown for the sake of the drug 
near Banbury. As a people, we are nothing if not 
conservative; but why, in spite of this, should we 
refuse a place among our flowers to such plants as 
rhubarb, such trees as apple and quince, and even 
such foliage plants as parsley ? Where natural beauty 
is sought for rather than the trim neatness of a 
suburban villa garden, nothing can be out of place 
that fits in with its surroundings, and is not an 
artificial mockery. With rhubarb either isolated as a 
single plant or grown on an eminence of the rock- 
garden against a background of shrubs, nothing is 
more majestic, and when the flower is over the 
glorious reddish-gold fruit is more beautiful still. 
What a wealth of weird lore gathers round the 
