The Elizabethan Garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare] Just before we come to the Elizabethan Garden, you can see the plum tree which the gardeners planted in honor of Tristan, son of Richard Devin, director of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and supporter of the Gardens during their early years. One play where I mention plums is King John. It comes in part of a handful of sweets given to a child by an indulgent grandmother:

grandam will
Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig:
There's a good grandam.

The rosemary in the Elizabethan Garden has become a tradition. In Hamlet, Ophelia, reciting the names and meanings of the several plants she carries, says,

Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

Before the plays here at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, actors are sometimes known to pluck and wear a sprig of rosemary to keep them sharp of mind and remember well their parts.

Growing on the ground here is chamomile (Anthemis nobilis), also called “apple of the earth”. It has a fine scent, and we used it in many ways. Nowadays you mostly steep its flowers in hot water and drink it for your health or pleasure. The plant is a symbol of humility, because it grows the better for being pressed to the earth. We sometimes grew it like a carpet in garden paths, so that its scent filled the air as people walked on it. In Henry IV, Part 1, Falstaff moralizes:

Harry, I do not only marvel where thou spendest thy
time, but also how thou art accompanied: for though
the chamomile, the more it is trodden on the faster
it grows, yet youth, the more it is wasted the sooner it wears.

Two junipers grace the middle of this garden, pruned into a rising spiral shape. The garden’s border is germander, a plant with a fine and polished look. And it survives the winters, too, albeit both great cold and much warmth come and go in most irregular ways here in Colorado. Yet this plant requires some control. It is akin to mint, and like mint it forms a wide-ranging tangle of stems under the ground whereby, if not watched and trimmed back, it wanders all about the garden. Its name, germander, is the source of your word “gerrymander”, for polling precincts with wandering bounds unreasonable.

One favorite in this garden is lady’s bedstraw, with which we stuffed mattresses. Its highly fragrant flowers smell of fresh-mown hay, yet sweeter, like what you have here to call vanilla. Once dried, we keep their scent a long time. The “lady” of this bedstraw is the Virgin Mary; this plant named for her was thought to bring good fortune to the beds of women who were with child. The plant is of medical use too. We used it to help heal burns, wounds, rashes, and other ills of the skin, and also epilepsy. We made dyes from it to boot. The flowers yield a yellow dye for butter, cheese, and cloth, and hair; the roots gave a deep red dye. Sometimes people call the plant cheese rennet because it makes the milk to curd for cheese making. Moreover, fleas mislike it. That is very useful in mattresses and elsewhere.

This garden sometimes also holds comfrey, valerian, lady’s mantle, fleabane, miniature roses, strawberries, lavender cotton, wolf-flower, foxglove, delphinium, and sweet betony.