The myrtle was early loved in England. In one of the old Roxburgh Ballads of the Fifteenth Century a lover presses his suit by promising:
And I will make the beds of Roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies;
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered with leaves of myrtle.
In those days and long afterward there was a saying that "if you want to be sure of your myrtle taking root, then you must spread out your dress grandly and look proud" when you are planting your slip. We can imagine one of the Fifteenth Century ladies spreading her voluminous and flowing robes with majestic grace and holding her head adorned with the tall pointed cap, or hennin, with veil fluttering from its peak as she planted the little flower in her tiny walled Garden of Delight!
There is a saying, too, that one must never pass a sweet myrtle bush without picking a spray. The flowering myrtle is considered the luckiest of all plants to have in the window, but it must be watered every day.
Autumn
"HERBS OF GRACE" AND "DRAMS OF
POISON"
I
Rosemary and Rue
ROSEMARY (Rosmarinus officinalis). Rosemary "delights in sea-spray," whence its name. "The cheerful Rosemary," as Spenser calls it, was in high favor in Shakespeare's day. The plant was not only allowed a corner in the kitchen-garden; but it was trained over arbors and allowed to run over the mounds and banks pretty much at its own sweet will. "As for Rosemarie," said Sir Thomas More, "I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it, but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance, and, therefore, to friendship; whence a spray of it hath a dumb language that maketh it the chosen emblem at our funeral-wakes and in our burial-grounds."
