How to Plant a Shakespeare Garden

Shakespeare's House

A Shakespeare garden features herbs, flowers, shrubs and trees found in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets. The great English playwright William Shakespeare (1564-1616) filled his literary works with references to flowers and scenes set in gardens. Any garden can have a touch of Shakespeare, large or small, to lend a little old-world atmosphere to the garden paths. For the grand scale, you can spend years exploring the many Shakespearean gardens in the world. On a smaller scale, here are ideas from American gardens to help you design and plant your Shakespeare garden.

Difficulty:

Moderately Easy

Instructions

1. Viola

   Borrow ideas from Blount Cultural Park in Alabama. This is a major Shakespearean garden. The formal garden features trees, shrubs and flowers from most of Shakespeare's works. Designers for this garden planted roses and honeysuckle for covering trellises. They chose pansies, violas and marigolds for annual bright color. The landscape includes 8,000 narcissus and over 500 rosemary and lavender plants. Adapt their sweeping grandeur to your garden scale.

2. Take climate tips from Northwestern University in Illinois. The university chose to commemorate the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's death by planting a Shakespearean garden. The landscape architect selected plants best suited to the Midwestern climate. Final garden plans included daffodils, pansies, marigolds, and poppies. Popular herbs planted include rosemary, thyme, lemon balm, parsley and mint. The garden design has evolved over the years, but the hardy plants remain. These plants fit very well in most home gardens.

3. Tulip

   Create a Shakespeare path like the Central Park Conservancy in New York. The garden was planted over a rocky hillside. The informal garden follows a twisting path with benches and a wood fence. Early in the cold spring flowers like crocuses, hellebores and columbines bloom. They are followed by daffodils, violets and tulips. Iris and roses bloom in late spring. Summer is the garden's season for herbs, ferns and poppies. By autumn asters and ornamental grasses provide color. Adapt these ideas for your hillside or uneven garden terrain.

4. Focus on flowers. The Huntington Library in California highlights flowers of Shakespeare. The garden was designed to look like an old English country scene. The ultimate goal of the garden is to show the relationship of Shakespeare's literary art to plants. Seasonally the garden offers beautiful pansies, violets, pinks, daffodils, iris and roses. Plant a small country garden for all seasons with blooms chosen for successive blooming.

5. Rose

   Reflect on roses. The International Rose Test Garden in Oregon is a testing ground for new rose varieties. Founded in 1917, the garden includes Shakespeare lore and roses from around the world. If you are inclined, you can have a single rose or a full rose garden. Shakespeare wrote, “Of all flowers methinks a rose is best.”