Queen Elizabeth in the Garden

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Nonfiction

Gilded herbs for a virgin queen

QUEEN ELIZABETH IN THE GARDEN:
A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens
By Trea Martyn
325 pp. Blue Bridge

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

Sixteenth-century England evidently had a more temperate climate than exists there today. Gardeners of the period grew citrus trees! It's one of many interesting tidbits I came across while reading Queen Elizabeth in the Garden: A Story of Love, Rivalry, and Spectacular Gardens.

The author, Trea Martyn, who has taught garden history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and landscape history at Central Saint Martin's School of Art in London, is right at home with this absorbing look at Queen Elizabeth I and the two powerful men who vied for her favor with elaborate gardens. It was well known that Elizabeth loved gardens, and not only for strolling. She studied and used herbs as medicine, and favored strongly scented flowers and herbs to offset offensive smells, presumably from a common aversion to bathing.

Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, a manly man and Elizabeth's closest confidant, maintained lavish gardens at Kenilworth Castle, in Warwickshire, and had matrimony in mind. Meanwhile, William Cecil, Baron Burghley, her chief political adviser, oversaw the landscape at Theobalds Palace in Hertfordshire. His efforts were aimed at preserving the status quo by preventing any such marriage.

Many will find the politics and romance of the time fascinating, but if political rivals, beheadings, and flirtatious virgin queens aren't your cup of arsenic-laced tea, you'll still find the book a lavishly satisfying lesson in gardening history.

I was amazed to read that the cherry season could be extended for the Queen by covering the trees with canvas once they were in full bloom. Harvest could be postponed for a month.

Lavish garden parties complete with fountains, fireworks (hair-raising events staged with cannons and gunfire, which shook the ground and sometimes led to accidental structure fires) and stage productions entertained the Queen and her court. William Shakespeare was a mere boy when the garden parties began. It is believed that he either attended some of the festivities or knew about them--fodder aplenty for the stories he was destined to write.

With today's renewed interest in organic gardening, there is much to glean from the descriptions of Elizabethan methods for enriching the soil, irrigation--even beekeeping, as mentioned in this excerpt, describing the practice of John Gerard, the leading expert on herbs and rare plants at the time. He is known for his famous Herbal, published in 1597:

From the beginning of the dog days (around 17 July) until 18 September, he kept a close watch on his bees, making sure that they were protected from hornets. Two or three days before the new moon, he cleansed the hives, filling up any chinks and clefts against butterflies. He cut out the old combs from the hives in October and, during the winter months, kept his bees alive with sticks of fennel or honey and pear-tree leaves or herbs like flowering savory or marjoram, and then sprinkled them with sweet, pleasant wine, setting the sticks in a cross from one side of the hive to the other.

Sadly, the Renaissance gardens described in the book have only survived as ruins. The favored art form of the period was engravings, simplified black and white depictions sprinkled throughout the text that pale beside the author's visual descriptions. Here the author describes preparations for a queenly visit:

Painters were applying a special gum to the rosemary covering the thirteenth-century keep on the south side of the garden. They laid gold leaf on the needle-like leaves--in a few hours, the heat of the sun would harden the gum and bind the gold to it, so that the rosemary would stay gilded in the event of further rain.

I can close my eyes and visualize the garden 'tents', huge structures decorated with tapestries, vined arbors and magic. In reading Queen Elizabeth in the Garden, I also came away with the sense of fun that permeated the royal goings-on. Queen Elizabeth I lived to nearly 70, and why not? She got to play outside as much as she liked, didn't have to take a bath unless she felt like it, and ate cherries out of season.