SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
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mandrake (Mandragora officinalis , L.), a member, 
together with henbane, belladonna, nightshade, and 
many other noxious plants, of the order Solanacece . 
The plant is a native of Syria, and has purple 
flowers with orange-coloured berries. The root is 
long, fleshy, and forked, and from this root, with a 
little careful manipulation, came the grotesquely 
weird mandrake of the medievalist, which was said 
to be torn from the ground with screams, thus 
alluded to by the poet : 
Would curses kill as doth the mandrake’s groan. 
2 Henry VI., III. ii. 310. 
And shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth, 
That living mortals, hearing them, run mad. 
Romeo and Juliet, IV. iii. 47. 
With regard to this plant Gerard says: 
“ There hath been many ridiculous tales brought 
up of this plant, whether of old wives or some 
runagate surgeons or physicke-mongers, I know not. 
. . . They adde that it is never or very seldome to be 
found growing naturally but under a gallowes, where 
the matter that has fallen from a dead body hath 
given it the shape of a man and the matter of a 
woman, the substance of a female plant, and many other 
such doltish dreams. They fable further and affirme 
that he who would take up a plant thereof must tie 
a dog thereunto to pull it up, which will give a great 
shreeke at the digging up, otherwise if a man should 
do it he would surely die in a short space after.” 
That these fables are neither English nor 
medieval may at once be seen by a note ot 
Dr. Daubeny, quoted by Ellacombe, p. 163, where 
the Goddess of Discovery is represented as giving 
the root to Dioscorides; the dog she had used to 
pull up the plant is shown in the agonies of death. 
On its use in medicine, Lyle says, p. 437 : 
