16

The Elizabethan Flower Garden

by David Jacques

The early Elizabethan flower garden differed significantly from the late Elizabethan and Jacobean
one, not only in the design of knots, but also in that the latter accommodated a deluge of new plants
from Turkey and beyond via the Holy Roman Empire, Mexico via Spain and Canada via France.
The English apothecary John Parkinson (1566/7–1650) provided an excellent account of flower
gardening at the end of the Jacobean period, and other sources help to flesh out the aspects that he
did not cover. However no good contemporary account of an early Elizabethan flower garden has
come down to the present.
The principal sources on garden plants in the period in question include works by
Elizabethan writers Thomas Hyll (c.1528–c.1574), Henry Lyte (1529–1607 and Thomas Tusser
(c.1524–80). There are also useful observations from slightly later authors, principally Gervase
Markham (1568?–1637) and John Parkinson on the principles of planting. From their work, it is
possible to provide an outline of a strong gardening tradition in the early Elizabethan period, and to
specify which plants would have been considered suitable – none more so than the gillyflower.

Old and new forms of garden

Jacobean writers clearly held in their minds a distinction between the then modern flower garden,
filled with tulips, daffodils, hyacinths and other introductions and their cultivars on the one hand,
and an older form of flower garden on the other. Markham’s Chapter VI of the second book of The
English Husbandman (1613) was entitled ‘Of flowers of all sorts, both forraine and home-bred,
their sowing, planting, and preserving’, making the distinction between traditional English plants
and newly imported ones.1 Three years later Markham’s edition of Charles Estienne’s Maison
Rustique was issued as The Countrey Farm. In the section on the pleasure or flower garden, the
garden was divided into two parts: that for sweet-smelling herbs, with or without flowers, and the
‘Nosegay’ garden which was a spring garden with bulbs, especially ‘strange sorts’.2 Whilst both
types of garden would have been sweet smelling and colourful, the implied distinction here was that
the former had the advantage in its scent, whilst the spring garden had the advantage in providing a
show of colour early in the year.
John Parkinson made a similar distinction between ‘English’ flowers and what he described
as ‘outlandish’ ones. As to the former:
Those flowers that have beene usually planted in former times in Gardens of this Kingdome
… have by time and custome attained the name of English flowers, although the most of them
were never naturall of this our Land, but brought in from other Countries at one time or other
…3
Born 1567, Parkinson would have been 16 or 17 when he was apprenticed to a London apothecary,
and would probably have been introduced to his master’s garden of medicinal plants then. His
memory of ‘English’ flowers would then have stretched back to the 1580s. As Parkinson completed
his apprenticeship, became a young apothecary himself, and acted as apothecary to James I, he
would have witnessed, and to some extent participated in, the introduction of ‘outlandish’ flowers.
There were very few bulbs amongst the ‘English’ plants, with the Madonna lily being the
exception. The principal flower of the spring had long been the sweet violet (Viola odorata), of
which varieties had for centuries been selected from the wild and improved. The status of the
garden violet is indicated by the number of other spring-flowering plants referred to as ‘violets’
Viola Alba, V. Lutea, V. Matronalis (Fig. 16.1) and V. Latifolia, old Latin names for the stock
gillyflower, wallflower, sweet rocket and honesty respectively), and the dog’s tooth violet, the
white bulbous violet and the late flouring bulbous violet, the Elizabethan English names for
Erythronium dens-canis, the snowdrop (Galanthus nivalis) and snowflake (Leucoium vernum).
Parkinson’s list of flowers in the old English garden was thus overwhelmingly annual,
biennial and perennial herbaceous plants. The bulk of these flowers made their show in May, June,

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July and August. The most important factor about the new ‘outlandish’ flowers for Parkinson was
that they were predominantly bulbs flowering in the Spring, mainly in the months of February,
March and April.4
The outlandish flowers might not become common for some time after their introduction.
The English herbalist John Gerard (c.1545–1612) knew one Jacques Garret, an apothecary, whose
brother Peter was an Amsterdam merchant. Garret was a great tulip expert, who, when Gerard was
writing in 1597, had apparently been collecting and propagating the flower ‘for the space of twenty
yeares’.5 However tulips were still a ‘strange and forreine floure… with which all studious and
painefull Herbarists desire to be better acquainted’. Gerard was writing at the moment when a
limited number of tulips were being propagated by Dutch commercial gardeners, and so were
becoming available to the rich at a price, four decades after they were first described by western
herbarists.

The gillyflower garden

The old English garden was delighted in as much for its sweet scent as the beauty of its flowers.
Wolsey’s garden at Hampton Court was described thus:
My gardens sweet, enclosed with walls strong,
Embanked with benches to sit and take my rest;
The knots so enknotted it cannot be expressed,
With arbours and alleys so pleasant and so dulce,
The pestilent airs with flavours to repulse …6
Robert Langham’s description of the earl of Leicester’s garden at Kenilworth in 1575 also laid
emphasis upon scent:
Whear further allso by great cast and cost the sweetnes of sauoour on all sidez, made so
respiraunt from the redolent plants and fragrant earbs and floourz, in foorm, cooller and
quantitee so delicioously variaunt:
Francis Bacon included a passage on scent in his essay On Gardens. This was published in 1625,
but may have been written not long after his first collection of essays published in 1597:
And because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes, like the
warbling of music), than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight, than to
know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air.
He particularly commended the violet, ‘especially the white double Violet’, for yielding ‘the
sweetest smell in the air’. Next he named the musk rose, and then (wild) strawberry leaves ‘dying
[drying?] with a most excellent cordial smell’. Sweet-Briar, Wallflowers, Pinks, Gillyflowers, and
honeysuckle were amongst his favourites.7 For these reasons it is unsurprising that so many plant
names were prefixed by ‘sweet’ (bryer, violet, William, marjoram, and so on), nor that Parkinson’s
‘English’ flowers were headed by the gillyflower: ‘Carnations and Gilloflowers bee the chiefest
flowers of account in all our English Gardens’.8
The term ‘gillyflower’ (pronounced jillyflower) is derived from the Latin ‘carophyllum’, the
oriental clove of the spice trade. In later-medieval Latin the word was ‘gariofilium’ or ‘gilofera’,
amongst other variants. In medieval French the word was ‘girofle’, in English ‘gilofre’ or ‘gelofre’.
In medieval England the clove was used to flavour ale, and was mentioned by Chaucer as ‘clow-
gelofre’. Sweet-smelling flowers that could be used as a substitute were given the same name. In
the 14th century the French seem to have applied ‘giroflée’ to stocks and wallflowers. In England,
though, an early form of red Dianthus caryophyllus smelled similar to clove and was used for
flavouring drinks. In the vernacular the flower heads were often called ‘sops-in-wine’. The
derivation of gillyflowers as ‘July-flowers’ is today seen as an apparently plausible (in that they do
flower in July), if incorrect, guess.
The Fromond list of herbs, in an English cookery book of shortly after 1500, includes the
‘Gyllofre’ as suitable amongst the ‘herbes for the copp [cup]’ and ‘herbes for Savour and beaute’.9
In the garden the term ‘gillyflower’ had expanded to include a number of highly-scented flowers of
several species in the Dianthus genus and certain cruciferous ones. In the former genus were the

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clove gillyflower, with the larger but otherwise very similar carnations (Dianthus caryophyllus
vars), the pinks (Dianthus plumarius vars), and the sweet Williams and sweet Johns (Dianthus
barbatus vars). The principal cruciferous species were the stock-gillyflowers (Matthiola incana
vars) and the wall-gillyflowers (Cheiranthus cheiri vars), but there was also the ‘Queen’s
gillyflower’ (modern ‘sweet rocket’) (Hesperis matronalis).
William Turner made a list of plants in 1538, including the ‘incarnation’, and giving the
alternatives ‘gelofer’ and ‘clowgelofer’ (Fig. 16.2). A note is necessary on ‘pink’ and ‘carnation’. In
the 16th century the term ‘pink’ referred to the pinked edges of the Dianthus genus’s flowers.
Cardinal Wolsey purchased a basket of ‘picroses’ in 1515, which has prompted the suggestion that
their original name equated with ‘pinked rose’.10 ‘Pink’ was not used to denote the colour until
about 1720: the colour was denoted by ‘carnation’, i.e. the colour of flesh. So carnations were pink,
and pinks were jagged-edged.
Pinks were developed in the near East, and brought to Europe by the Ottoman Turks in the
15th century. The clove gillyflowers, including the slightly larger carnations, had similar origins,
they were known in Spain by the 15th century, in France by 1493, and England soon after 1500.
Flemish paintings depicted carnations in beds and pots from about 1475, indicating a specialised
culture already in that country.11
Wall-gillyflowers, or ‘wallflowers’, had the obvious derivation that they had been
naturalised on the tumbledown walls of castles and other structures since the Middle Ages. ‘Stocks’
had a stem, which differentiated them from other gillyflowers, so in the 16th century they were
‘stock-gillyflowers’. These two crucifers were well known to the Moors in Spain from the 11th
century at the latest, and thence found their way into Christian Europe. Accounts for the gardens at
Hampton Court from 1530 included items for ‘strowbery, primerose, violets, sete willms’,
‘Gillavers slipps and for swete Willms; vii raks; violet rotts, prymrose and swete Willms’, and
‘Gillavers, mynts and other swete flowers’, the latter being set at the end of March 1530/1.12 This
was the same decade as Holbein’s court portraits (Fig 16.3). That of Georg Gisze has an elegant
glass vase with pink carnations, and sprigs of lavender and marjoram (Fig. 16.4). Other portraits
show individuals holding single red gillyflowers.13 Thomas Tusser’s list included ‘Gelyflowers red
whight and carnacions’ (i.e. red, white and pink), ‘Pinkes of all sorts’, ‘Quenegeliflowers’, sops-in-
wine, Sweet Williams, Sweet Johns, ‘Stock geliflowers’, ‘Tuft geliflowers’ (unclear what this was),
and ‘Wall geliflowers of all sorts’.
There are a number of references to plants in the earl of Leicester’s gardens at Wanstead. In
February 1585, and in April, Gough, the gardener, was given 20 shillings to buy herbs to set, and a
large number of pots including one hundred gillyflower pots. In June Gough bought forty-seven
pots of gillyflowers as well as hyssop, thyme and herbs.14
The English passion for gillyflowers was evidently still on the boil in the 1590s, with Ralph
Tuggey of Westminster being the most diligent importer and breeder. Gerard commented:
There are at this day under the name of Caryophyllus comprehended divers and sundry sorts
of plants, of such various colours, and also severall shapes, that a great and large volume
would not suffice to write of every one at large in particular; considering how infinite they
are, and how every yeare every climate and countrey bringeth forth new sorts…15
Unfortunately Gerard appeared daunted at this prospect, so it was left to Parkinson to provide the
definitive account of ‘Gilliflowers, the pride of our English Gardens’.16 He could list 19 varieties of
carnation, and 29 gillyflowers, besides about 15 pinks and 7 Sweet Williams and Sweet Johns. He
observed that: ‘Wall flowers are common in every Garden, as well the ordinary double as the
single… Stock-Gilloflowers likewise are almost as common as Wall-flowers …’.17

Colour varieties and doubles

There will always be some variation arising from seed propagation. In a wild population of
bluebells there will be a tiny fraction of albinos, and white campion can be observed alongside the
red. The curious gardener could find mutations by careful observation and these could be selected
to become new varieties. The best way to fix the variety was by slips (cuttings). Gerard observed

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about the cornflower that ‘it is sowne in gardens, which by cunning to looking doth oft times
become of other colours, and also double…’.18 Hence ‘English’ flowers included early garden
varieties, prized for their unusual differences. Few had any practical use, and the rising interest in
them in 1575 is a sure sign of gardening purely for pleasure.
Many early varieties were imported from the Muslim world, first Moorish Spain, then
Turkey. The early forms of the garden violet seem to have been principally from Moorish Spain.
The Turks had developed Dianthus caryophyllus and D. plumarius forms (carnations, double
gillyflowers and pinks) (see Fig.16.2). William Turner realised that ‘the garden Gelovers are made
so pleasant and sweet with the labours and wit of man, and not by nature’.19 The Turks obtained
many other plants from Persia, including anemones, tulips, hyacinths, Ranunculus, lilac, common
jasmine and Philadelphus. The Persians themselves were on the trade route to India and China. The
hollyhock was originally from India, something one would not suspect when noticing that every
French village street has hollyhocks in all their colour varieties. Other varieties and hybrids that had
mysterious far-away origins in southern Europe included most of the roses, several being double
and semidouble, the Iris species and hybrids (Fig 16.5), the stocks (Matthiola incana), but above all
the Dianthus barbatus cultivars: Sweet William and Sweet John.
Varieties from northern Europe included some doubles of the daisy (Bellis perennis, red and
white forms, also a ‘childing’ form), columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris), marigold (Calendula
officinalis), cowslip (Primula veris) and primrose (Primula vulgaris). ‘Batchelors buttons’ gave
especial delight, and in 1575 these were the highly double forms of the otherwise unremarkable red
campion (Silene dioica) and yellow-flowering rape crowfoot (Ranunculus bulbosus). However most
varieties were colour variants, typically white and red forms of flowers generally purple or blue in
the natural state, as with snapdragons (Antirrhinum majus), columbines (Aquilegia vulgaris) (Fig.
16.6), bottle or cornflower (Centaurea cyanus), throatwort (Campanula trachelium) and forking
larkspur (Consolida regalis). Variations in colour or form of leaf, fruit and seed were noticed, such
as the white-berried strawberry, and the jagged flowers of some forms of the opium poppy.
Goatsbeard (Tragopogon porrifolius, in the same family as the dandelion) and Maltese Cross or
Nonesuch (Lychnis chalcedonica) were prized for the unusual forms of their flowers. One English
speciality was the Primula hortensis Anglica (double paigle) (Fig. 16.7).20
At the time there was no understanding of the principles of hybridization between species, a
concept developed in the 18th century. Nevertheless there were hybrids amongst the roses (R. x
alba, x damascena, x francofurtana, x centifolia), no doubt unintentional crosses occurring in the
gardens of Persia and the Middle East. William Harrison remarked that ‘If you look into our
gardens annexed to our houses, how woonderfullie is their beauty increased, not only with flowers,
which Columella calleth Terrena sydera, saying, Pingit & in varios terrestria sydera flores, [And
paints terrestrial constellations with varied flowers.]’.21 He expanded upon
How art also helpeth nature, in the dailie colouring, dubling and inlarging the proportion of
our floures, it is incredible to report: for so curious and cunning are our gardeners now in
these daies, that they presume to doo in maner what they list with nature, and moderate hir
course in things as if they were hir superiours.

The annual cycle

The annual cycle of the Elizabethan flower garden was that cited by Classical authors: that the
garden should be double-dug and manured in late autumn to produce a rich, friable, soil, in time for
seeding of vegetables and herbs in the spring. Thomas Hyll had written that his ‘delectable flowers’
‘ought to be committed to the earth in the spring time, and sown in the moneths of March and
April…’, and supplemented this with lengthy advice on astrological factors (Fig. 16.8). Parkinson
implied that the English flower garden was dug over during the winter and set and/or sown in
spring:
Whereas it is the usuall custome of most in this Land, to turne up their Gardens, and to plant
them againe in the Spring of the yeare, which is the best time that may bee chosen for all
English flowers, yet it is not so for your Out-landish flowers.22

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He went on to point out that a garden for outlandish flowers had a fundamentally different annual
cycle.23 As the plants were predominantly spring-flowering bulbs, these needed to be lifted out of
the ground in July or August and planted again well before Christmas, which precluded them being
dug over in late autumn or early winter.
The visual evidence for the feverish gardening activity in March is ample. A Flemish
miniature of about 1490 shows activity in March, plants arriving in pots and gardeners setting them
out.24 A much-reproduced painting by Pieter Breughel, and its engraving by H Cock in 1570, shows
gillyflowers in earthenware pots, and cypresss or another tall thin pruned shrub in wicker baskets,
brought in to be planted in freshly prepared beds (Fig.16.9).25 This image suggests that trained
shrubs were taken out in the autumn, and replanted in the spring. Such ‘estrade’ (like a cakestand)
shrubs were grown in pots, and others were set, possibly plunged, into the centres of beds.
Hyll wrote briefly of the practice of taking slips for replanting in the Spring.26 Parkinson
wrote that gillyflowers could be propagated by seeds or slips, but the latter was clearly the more
usual, and he remarked that the traditional practice was to ‘slippe and set in September, as many use
to doe, or yet in August, as some may thinke will doe well’.27 Those months had presumably been
chosen because the summer display would then be over, and the taking of slips would be sensible
before the ground was broken up and prepared over winter for setting these new slips in the spring.
He himself thought differently, and advocated taking the slips in May which would ‘give you plants
that will be so strongly growne before Winter, that… you shall have them beare flowers the next
yeare after, and yield you increase of slippes also’. He thought that taking slips from gillyflowers
that had already flowered was not good practice:
whereas many are over greedy to have their plants to give them flowers, and therefore let
them runne all to flower, so farre spending themselves thereby, that after they have done
flowring, they grow so weake, having out spent themselves, that they cannot possibly be
preserved from the injuries of the succeeding Winter.
The winter was problematic for many of the plants of the early Elizabethan flower garden. Not only
were the carnations and clove gillyflowers susceptible to frost, but so was the bordering of thrift,
and other of the contents like snapdragons. Some form of winter protection would have been
desirable, and those propagated in one year would need to be portable so that they could be moved
outside the following year. For these reasons the carnation was very often grown in pots (Fig.
16.10).

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1
Gervase Markham, The English Husbandman (London, 1613).
2
Charles Estienne, Maison Rustique or the Countrey Farme, Gervase Markham (ed.), (London, 1616),
235.
3
John Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris (London, 1629), 11.
4
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris, 8.
5
John Gerard, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, enlarged and amended by Thomas
Johnson, (London, 1633),137–40.
6
George Cavendish, The Life of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish, Samuel Weller Singer, ed.,
(Second edn, London, 1827), 532.
7
Francis Bacon, Of Gardens (1625), (London, 1902), 9–10.
8
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris, 17.
9
John Harvey, Early Gardening Catalogues (Chichester, 1972), 59, 60.
10
John H. Harvey, ‘Gillyflower and carnation’, in Garden History, VI/1, Spring 1978, 51 .
11
John Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens (London, 1981), illus. 55 & colour plate VIIB.
12
TNA, E/36/241, fos 267–90.
13
Susan Foister, Holbein and England (London and New Haven, 2004), figs 34, 215, 238.
14
Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558–1561,
1584–1586, Simon Adams (ed.), Camden 5th Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
239, 241, 261.
15
Gerard,The Herball, 589.
16
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris, 8.
17
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris, 11.
18
Gerard,The Herball, 734.
19
William Turner, A New Herball, wherein are conteyned the names of Herbes in Greke, Latin,
Englysh, Duch, Frenche, and in the Potecaries and Herbaries Latin, with the properties, degrees and
naturall places of the same (London, 1551), I, 113.
20
Gerard,The Herball , Johnson, ed., 780.
21
William Harrison, ‘Description of England’, 1577, in Raphael Holinshed, The First and Second
Volumes of Chronicles (London, 1587), II, ch. 20, 322.
22
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris 13.
23
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole: Paradisus Terrestris. 13.
24
Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens, illus. 65.
25
Didymus Mountaine, The Gardener’s Labyrinth, 1652, Richard Mabey (ed.), (Oxford University
Press, 1988), 63.
26
Mountaine, The Gardener’s Labyrinth, 92.
27
Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole:Paradisus Terrestris, 19.