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wahistorian 's review for:
The Quest for Shakespeare's Garden
by Roy Strong
A delightful, highly illustrated story of how the quest to recreate Shakespeare’s garden shaped garden history and gardens themselves. The bard’s beds at New Place became a sort of ur-garden for Victorians, who had the money and leisure to think about what plantings ought to look like and how they should be arranged. Publishing pushed the study forward, as numerous garden enthusiasts compiled catalogs of plants mentioned in the plays and poetry. And scholars combed through early works, especially Francis Bacon’s essay “Of Gardens,” to divine how Elizabethans organized the natural world. The result has been a series of shifting concepts of how a garden works: how it smells and looks, what is the balance of wild and tamed, and, most importantly, how it pleases and restores the human spirit.