Botanist's Garden: The Garden of Euphues

In 1545 the first Botanic Garden in Europe was founded at Padua, to be followed in the next hundred years by many others. The interest in botany and the fever of collecting made many private individuals establish `gardens' ... but these are not gardens in our sense, though the distinction was not always apparent. There were men who planted woods and there were men who collected trees and the latter for some time confused themselves with the former. Nowhere was this confusion more likely to take place than in England, where flower-growing was most easy, and it was there in the middle of the seventeenth century that the `botanist's garden' was for a time dominant. It is easy to compile lists of flowers mentioned as being in gardens at a certain date, but this is no indication that such flowers were commonly grown, rather the contrary. Acanthus, asphodel, auricula, amarantha, bachelor's button, cornflower, cowslip, daffodil, daisy, gilliflower, hollyhock, iris, jasmine, lavender, lily, lily of the valley, marigold, narcissus, pansy, paeony, periwinkle, poppy, primrose, rocket, rose, rosemary, snapdragon, stock, sweet william, wallflower, winter-cherry, and violet, have been collected as a list for Tudor England, but we can be reasonably sure that few gardens in England contained all of them and even fewer on the Continent. Grass lawns, on the other hand, all English gardens had, and these were of a quality that Continental gardens could never achieve. The finest turf was used for bowling greens. Bowls, a thirteenth-century game, was commonly played in alleys attached to taverns, but in 1541 an Act was passed establishing a penalty of six shillings and eight pence for anyone who played the game outside his own orchard or garden, while those who owned land of a yearly value of one hundred pounds or more could obtain licenses to play on their own private greens. Governmental interest in bowls had two sources: first because its very general popularity had caused a de-cline in archery which the State wished to encourage for military reasons, and second because it had become a great gambling game. The act of 1541 encouraged the development of good turf and also the essentially English practice of using gardens for games. The Civil War and the temporary suspense of the monarchy drew a hard line across English gardening. There is no greater materialist than a Puritan and the period of the so-called Commonwealth was disfigured by the attempt to live by bread alone.