Did Shakespeare garden? Visitors to Stratford could be forgiven for thinking so as the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust maintains five gardens at houses associated with the Bard, including New Place, which has just undergone a £6m transformation.
Yet, as art historian and landscape designer Sir Roy Strong outlines in his latest book, The Quest for Shakespeare’s Garden, the New Place plot owes as much to nostalgia, patriotism and a dislike for Victorian bedding as it does to historical fact.
The recent revamping of New Place included an overhaul of its Elizabethan-style knot garden, first created in 1920 by Ernest Law.
It’s this knot garden, says Sir Roy, that occupies a special place in gardening history.
“. . . this recreated Elizabethan garden is not just sentimental curiosity but a milestone in the emergence of garden history and recreation,” he tells us and he describes the garden, created after a public appeal for funds, as “the first major public attempt in England to accurately recreate a garden of another age.”
The appeal of the past and, in particular, what was considered to be a golden age was shaped also by the timing of the New Place garden, coming two years after the First World War.
“Amid the turbulence of that era, security and tranquillity were seen to reside in recreating the past,” comments Sir Roy.
The knot garden was laid out ‘in accordance with authentic contemporary plans’ but these were not specific to New Place; although contemporary reports state that it had a ‘greate garden’ beyond that nothing is known about it, including whether Shakespeare altered what was there when he bought the property in 1597.
However, the book is not concerned so much with the building of this garden as with the emergence of the idea of garden history and the linking of Shakespeare with nature that together provided the impetus for its creation.
In his characteristic lively style, Sir Roy takes us on a journey through the past covering the influence of the 18th century actor David Garrick on Shakespeare’s popular image, the Victorian fashion for the ‘language of flowers’ and the beginnings of the study of the history of the English garden.
Along the way, we encounter the flower-obsessed novelist Marie Corelli, Daisy, Countess of Warwick, who planted a ‘Shakespeare border’, and Henry Ellacombe, who first considered the idea of Elizabethan gardening in his 1878 book The Plant-Lore and Garden-Craft of Shakespeare.
Ellacombe, we discover, was particularly attracted to the idea of Elizabethan gardening because he considered Shakespeare’s flowers to be ‘thoroughly English’ and hated the Victorian practice of planting tender annuals from Central and South America.
“ . . . it offered ammunition in the battle against mid-Victorian bedding out,” explains Sir Roy, former director of the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Of course, much of the alliance between Shakespeare and nature comes from the many references to flowers in his plays and these are quoted throughout the book.
They, along with paintings depicting the plays, details from Elizabethan gardening books and old photographs, help to break up what is carefully researched text, sometimes literally as I found my train of thought distracted by an engraving or quote.
The book concludes with Francis Bacon’s 1625 essay in which he outlines his views on what a garden should contain, something he describes as ‘the purest of human pleasures’.
• The Quest for Shakespeare’s Garden by Roy Strong is published in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust by Thames & Hudson, priced £14.95 RRP. Buy now (If you buy via this Amazon link, I get a small payment. The price you pay is not affected.)
• Review copy supplied by Thames & Hudson.
• Read Roy Strong on Shakespeare, Gardens and Hanging Baskets here and about my visit to his garden, The Laskett, here
• More more of my book reviews here
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