have consulted when laying out his own Knott Garden". The same engraving was used in laying out the Queen's Garden behind Kew Palace in 1969. Ernest Law's, Shakespeare's Garden, Stratford-upon-Avon (1922), with photographic illustrations showing quartered plats in patterns outlined by green and grey clipped edgings, each centred by roses grown as standards, must have supplied impetus to many flower-filled revivalist Shakespeare's gardens of the 20s and 30s. For Americans, Esther Singleton produced The Shakespeare Garden (New York, 1931). Singleton's and Law's plantings, as with most Shakespeare gardens, owed a great deal to the bountiful aesthetic of the partly revived but largely invented "English cottage garden" tradition dating from the 1870s. Few attempts were made in revived garden plans to keep strictly to historical plants, until the National Trust led the way in the 1970s with a knot garden at Little Moreton Hall, Cheshire, and the restored parterre at Hampton Court Palace (1977). Recent developments The conventions of Shakespeare Gardens were familiar enough in the 1920s that E.F. Benson sets the opening of Mapp and Lucia (1931) in the not-quite-recently widowed Lucia's "Perdita's Garden" at Riseholme, in words that epitomise Benson's dry touch: Shakespeare's flora Shakespeare grew up in a small town with gardens, surrounded by meadow, river and woodlands. His references to trees, herbs, kitchen and flower garden plants are correct botanically, and are a source for plants' names and uses in Elizabethan times. English ships exploring the New World brought back new plants to join the local ones being designed for estates or in the kitchen garden outside the tradeswoman's door. The Elizabethans gave symbolic meaning to certain plants, as Ophelia's speech (below) illustrates. Shakespeare uses individual plants, gardens, gardening knowledge and skills (e.g. pruning), forests and other landscapes to describe character and place, set or shift tone and mood, make allusions perhaps that in prose would prove politically dangerous. The best known reference in Shakespeare of plants used for symbolic purposes, aside from passing mention, as in Romeo and Juliet, "What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." is Ophelia's speech from Hamlet: Shakespeare devotes five History plays Henry VI, Part 1, 2, 3; Richard III, Henry VIII to the Wars of the Roses which lasted from 1455 to 1485. This dynastic struggle between two houses (York and Lancaster) was resolved when Henry VII married Elizabeth of