Shakespeare Garden In Tudor Design

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22867, 23 October 1937, Page 6 (Supplement)

Shakespeare Garden In Tudor Design

Old-fashioned Flowers

r JpWO hundred and fifty years after Shakespeare wrote his plays, the plot of land which was once his private garden was handed over to trustees to be kept for ever as a commemoration garden. Because of the prevailing fashion, coupled with very little iniugination, the garden was at once "ornamentally laid out" with lawns and walks and neat beds of scarlet geraniums, yellow calceolarias and blue lobelias. It was enclosed by cast-iron railings, and iron benches and cement flower vases and other early Victorian material went into it. For more than half a century it remained the same. But to-day Shakespeare's garden has been entirely remodelled. Near the house i 3 a medieval Knott garden, such as may probably have existed in Shakespeare's time, that is, a pattern of small beds each outlined by neat box edging. A long border of such flowers as were certainly known to Shakespeare is another feature. In it are hollyhocks, canterbury bells, lupins, larkspurs, marigolds, crown imperials, lilies and pansies. The border is set out with old-fashioned formality, with quaint dividing hedges or buttresses of yew, and edgings of box. A low wall of old bricks laid in the Tudor fashion (one lengthways and one head on) has been copied from illustrations of gardens of the period.