Leate, being a most enthusiastic flower fancier and garden lover, not only imported rare specimens but tried many experiments. Indeed we are surprised in going through old garden manuals of Shakespearean days to see how many and how varied were the attempts to produce "sports" and novelties. We read of grafting a rosebush and placing musk in the cleft in an effort to produce musk-roses; recipes for changing the color of flowers; methods for producing double flowers; and instructions for grafting and pruning plants, sowing seeds, and plucking flowers during the increase, or waning, of the moon.
These professional florists and gentlemen amateurs valued their rare specimens from foreign countries as they valued their emeralds from Peru, Oriental pearls from Ceylon and rubies from India. Parkinson says very earnestly:
"Our English gardeners are all, or most of them, ignorant in the ordering of their outlandish[5] flowers, as not being trained to know them. And I do wish all gentlemen and gentlewomen whom it may concern for their own good, to be as careful whom they trust with the planting and replanting of their fine flowers as they would be with so many jewels; for the roots of many of them, being small and of great value, may soon be conveyed away and a clean, fair tale told that such a root is rotten, or perished in the ground, if none be seen where it should be; or else that the flower hath changed in color when it had been taken away, or a counterfeit one had been put in the place thereof; and thus many have been deceived of their daintiest flowers, without remedy or knowledge of the defect."
[5] Exotic.
The influence of the Italian Renaissance upon the Elizabethan garden has already been shown [(see page 15)], but the importance of this may be appropriately recalled here in the following extract from Bloom:
"The Wars of the Roses gave little time for gardening; and when matters were settled and the educational movements which marked the dawn of the Renaissance began, the gardens once again, after a break of more than a thousand years, went back to classical models, as interpreted by the Italian school of the time. Thus the gardens of the Palace of Nonesuch (1529) and Theobald's (1560) showed all the new ideas: flower-beds edged with low trellises, topiary work of cut box and yew, whereby the natural growth of the trees was trained into figures of birds and animals and especially of peacocks; while here and there mounts were thrown up against the orchard or garden wall, ascended by flights of steps and crowned with arbors, while sometimes the view obtained in this manner was deemed insufficient and trellised galleries extended the whole length of the garden. In 1573 the gardens of Kenilworth, which Shakespeare almost certainly visited, had a terrace walk twelve feet in width and raised ten feet above the garden, terminating at either end in arbors redolent with sweetbrier and flowers. Beneath these again was a garden of an acre or more in size divided into four quarters by sanded walks and having in the center of each plot an obelisk of red porphyry with a ball at the top. These were planted with apple, pear and cherry while in the center was a fountain of white marble."
II
The Elizabethan Garden
The Elizabethan garden was usually four-square, bordered all around by hedges and intersected by paths. There was an outer hedge that enclosed the entire garden and this was a tall and thick hedge made of privet, sweetbrier, and white thorn intermingled with roses. Sometimes, however, this outer hedge was of holly. Again some people preferred to enclose their garden by a wall of brick or stone. On the side facing the house the gate was placed. In stately gardens the gate was of elaborately wrought iron hung between stone or brick pillars on the top of which stone vases, or urns, held brightly blooming flowers and drooping vines. In simple gardens the entrance was a plain wooden door, painted and set into the wall or hedge like the quaint little doors we see in England to-day and represented in Kate Greenaway's pictures that show us how the style persists even to the present time.