The History of the colorado Shakespeare Gardens
A Shakespeare Garden is exactly what it sounds like: a garden that grows the plants mentioned in Shakespeare's plays. Roses, violets, rosemary, rue, lavender, thyme—the herbs and flowers that show up in the poetry, the love scenes, the murders, the madness.
There are Shakespeare Gardens all over the world, but this one, founded in 1991, sits in a courtyard at the University of Colorado Boulder, right next to where they've been performing Shakespeare plays since 1944.
The founder, Marlene Cowdrey, had been going to those plays since 1960. In 1984 she visited Shakespeare's hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon and came back with an idea. She said the gardens would be "a source of wonder and delight that flowers from the entwining of two loves—gardening and Shakespeare's plays." She became the first garden guide, wearing lavender always, with a flowery sun hat and a basket of dried flowers. The earliest plants came from her own backyard.
Volunteers meet every spring to research the plays in that summer's festival—the history, the culture, the plants. Their primary source is an 1878 book called Plant Lore and Garden Crafts of Shakespeare by an English vicar named Henry Nicholson Ellacombe, who catalogued every plant Shakespeare mentioned, indexed by play, act, and scene. His book helped create the whole concept of Shakespeare gardens worldwide.
The courtyard itself has its own gardening history. It's named for Mary Rippon, who came to CU Boulder in 1878 to head the German department—believed to be the first woman to teach at a state university in the United States. She loved flowers, kept a diary about ones she found in the hills, and brought lily of the valley pips from Germany. When she and the university president decided to landscape the bare campus, oral tradition says she soaked bed sheets and laid them over the ground so seeds could germinate against the Boulder wind. She planted lilacs, apples, wild plums.