We lop away, that bearing boughs may live:
Had he done so, himself had borne the crown,
Which waste of idle hours hath quite thrown down."
Mr. Ellacombe, commenting upon this dialogue, remarks: "This most interesting passage would almost tempt us to say that Shakespeare was a gardener by profession; certainly no other passages that have been brought to prove his real profession are more minute than this. It proves him to have had practical experience in the work, and I think we may safely say that he was no mere 'prentice hand in the use of the pruning-knife." But this play was written in London, when he could hardly have known anything more of practical gardening than he had learned in his boyhood and youth at Stratford.
Grafting and the various ways of propagating plants by cuttings, slips, etc., are described or alluded to with equal accuracy; also the mischief done by weeds, blights, frosts, and other enemies of the husbandman and horticulturist. He writes on all these matters as we might expect him to have done in his last years at Stratford, after he had had actual experience in the management of a large garden at New Place and in farming operations on other lands he had bought in the neighborhood; but all these passages, like the one quoted from Richard II., were written long before he had a garden of his own. They were reminiscences of his observation as a boy, not the results of his experience as a country gentleman.