Botanical Shakespeare: An Illustrated Compendium of All the Flowers, Fruits, Herbs, Trees, Seeds, and Grasses Cited by the World’s Greatest Playwright

416 Pages·2017·14.53 MB·English

by  Gerit Quealy

BURGUNDY, Henry V [Act V, sc. 2]
DEDICATION
To Allison Kyle Leopold for her unflagging mentorship and friendship [and
launch into garden writing] and Eloïse Watt for creating the Shakespeare
Workout, a gym for the universe of verse, and playground for Shakespeare geeks
galore —Gerit Quealy
To Simon, Brad, Sharon, Adam, and Fred for all their help and support —Sumié
Hasegawa-Collins
EPIGRAPH
Yet Nature is made better by no mean But Nature makes that mean: so, over that
Art Which you say adds to Nature, is an Art That Nature makes.
You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock, And make conceive a bark of baser kind By
bud of nobler race: this is an Art Which does mend Nature, change it rather, but
The ART itself is NATURE.
—Winter’s Tale [Act IV, Scene 4]
SONG OF SPRING, Love’s Labour’s Lost [Act V, sc. 2]

CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
FOREWORD by HELEN MIRREN
INTRODUCTION
THE BOTANICALS: Plant Portraits, Alphabetically and QUOTES
BOTANICALS DEFINED: Syllabic Sketches
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
OBERON, A Midsummer Night’s Dream [Act II, sc. 1]
FOREWORD
This graceful volume is the marriage of Shakespeare’s words about plants and
the plants themselves. It beautifully combines my love of Shakespeare and of
gardening. Seeing what each plant looks like, their faces if you will, is
fascinating, and incredibly helpful, especially with the more obscure ones.
My penchant for gardening came during my time with the Royal
Shakespeare Company in Stratford—the physicality of the material and the
material world of plants sort of converged. There I developed a passion for the
countryside—the gold and green of the landscape, the changing colours and
textures of the seasons, the scent of damp earth and pungent wildflowers.
It’s the experience of each that provides the thrill: getting your hands dirty,
diving down to the root of it all, finding the real joy of growth. “Joy’s soul lies in
the doing,” says Shakespeare’s Cressida, and it’s true.
Nature has become a passion and a tonic for me so finding a way to keep it
close is a priority [I even made a garden outside my trailer in Lithuania while
shooting Elizabeth I]. It satisfies what I call my appetite for solitude.
How delightful then that this elegant book contains all of Shakespeare’s
words about plants beside exquisite drawings of the plants themselves. You can
sit with it in solitude and have a direct experience of each plant. You can almost
touch or smell each one. Maybe it will make you want to do that—feel the spiky
thorns of the rose or the fuzzy heads of burdock. I hope so. I love the fact that
the olives I grow in my garden appear in six different plays, plus a sonnet [107]:
“Peace proclaims Olives of endless age.”
— Helen Mirren
OPHELIA, Hamlet [Act IV, sc. 5]