Garden Club

Shakespeare was reputed to have been an avid gardener, sharing cuttings from New Place, his retirement home. Certainly his literary works are peppered with well-informed references to flowers, trees and herbs.

As we strolled through three gardens of the Shakespeare Trust, guided expertly by Roger Pringle at the January meeting, it was easy to imagine that these gardens are remnants of Tudor times. However, Roger showed us with a host of photographs, paintings and documents that the original spaces were far from these.

When we see the exquisite planting around Anne Hathaway’s family home it is difficult to imagine the hovel that the Birthplace Trust bought and resurrected in Victorian times, and that the small arboretum surrounding it was only planted in 1988.

I imagine tourists visiting the Birthplace would be fascinated to see those pictures of the place’s re-invention in recent times because the gardens seem to be an integral part of the whole. The garden at New Place was also reconstructed in the 1920’s.

Using many species of plants mentioned by Shakespeare the gardens are masterpieces, veritable works of art which evoke real Englishness.

Keeping the Tudor garden alive is easy, just use some of these – rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbine, violets, roses, daisies, willow, daffodils, oxlips, lilies, poppies, lady-smocks... ... Google the entire list... and if anyone has a spare root or two of Eglantine I would be very interested!

February 16th A Peep into the Past, Oxhill and surrounding villages – David Beaumont

March 15th AGM @ 7pm

Ann Saxton

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Last modified: March 03, 2012