The plant-lore and garden-craft of Shakespeare / by Henry N. Ellacombe.
- Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
- Date:
- 1896
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The plant-lore and garden-craft of Shakespeare / by Henry N. Ellacombe. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by UCL Library Services. The original may be consulted at UCL (University College London)
156/488 page 116
![that is most delicate and refreshing. But not only for its beauty is the Hawthorn a favourite tree, but also for its many pleasant associations—it is essentially the May tree, the tree that tells that winter is really past, and that summer has fairly begun. Hear Spenser— Thilke same season, when all is yclade With pleasaunce ; the ground with Grasse, the woods With greene leaves, the bushes with blooming buds, Youngthes folke now flocken in everywhere To gather May-buskets and smelling Brere ; And home they hasten the postes to dight. And all the kirk-pillours eare day-light, With Hawthorne buds, and sweet Eglantine, And girlondes-of Roses, and soppes-in-wine. Shepherds Calendar—]\[ay. Yet in spite of its pretty name, and in spite of the poets, the Hawthorn now seldom flowers till June, and I should suppose it is never in flower on May Day,i except perhaps in Devonshire and Cornwall; and it is very doubtful if it ever were so found, except in these southern counties, though some fancy that the times of flowering of several of our flowers are changed, and in some instances largely changed. But it was an old custom in Suffolk, in most of the farmhouses, that any servant who could bring in a branch of Hawthorn in full blossom on the ist of May was entitled to a dish of cream for breakfast. This custom is now disused, not so much from the reluctance of the masters to give the reward, as from the inability of the servants to find the AVhitethorn in flower —Brand's Antiquities? Even those who might not see the beauty of an old Thorn tree, have found its uses as one of the very few trees that will grow thick in the most exposed places, and so give pleasant shade and shelter m 1 -Gilbert White in his 'Naturalists' Calendar' as the result of observa- tions taken from 1768 to 1793 P«ts down the flowering of tlje Hawthorn as occurring in different years upon dates so widely apart as the twentieth of April and the eleventh of June. -Milner's Cotmiry Pleasures, p. 83. 2 In 1895 it was in flower in the last week of April.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21687882_0156.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
