The Founder’s Garden

Video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Founder’s Garden, Pansy, and Honeysuckle

As you and I, Will Shakespeare, stand at the north end of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival Gardens, looking through the arch at the University Theatre building, the Founder’s Garden is at your left hand. Embedded there is the Shakespeare Garden Rock, engraved with the Gardens’ birth year. The gardeners cleared the land in the spring of 1992, and Tribble Stone defined the beds using @@Tribble stone from nearby Lyons -- the same stone that is used to build much of this university. Expertly dry-stacked on a bed of gravel. These beds cost a thousand dollars.

Several kinds of thyme grow about the Shakespeare Garden Rock. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the faery king Oberon speaks of wild thyme mingled with other flowers in the forest:

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite o’er-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
There sleeps Titania some time of the night,
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight.

Thyme boasts pink and purple flowers and exhales a strong scent. Sir Francis Bacon, a statesman and philosopher of my time, wrote Of Gardens; he advises sowing wild thyme in garden alleys because it “perfumes the air most delightfully …  being trodden upon and crushed”. The musk-rose, too, we prized especially for its scent, perhaps even more than roses. The odor of plants was important to us, as were the colors. You can find both the musk-rose and the Queen’s cherished eglantine in the Midsummer Night’s garden.

Planted amongst the thyme are several kinds of dianthus, which we called “pinks”; a couple of lavenders; some tiny early-blooming daffodils; and a miniature rose. Here also is the little Viola tricolor that you call pansy, and heart’s-ease, and love-in-idleness. The pansy has long been associated with thoughts. Ophelia says so in Hamlet.

And here is pansies; that’s for thoughts

The very name comes from the French, penser, to think. You have larger pansies now, bred from the Viola tricolor about 150 years ago. The gardeners love this flower, and allow it to seed itself everywhere in the gardens.

Thymes have their place in medicine and cookery as well as in the garden. Here is common garden thyme, smaller and less fragrant than the wild thyme; lemon thyme, silver thyme, and others. Wooly thyme carpets the area between the Elizabethan Garden and the Founder’s Garden.

Now you also, like the Faery King Oberon, “know a bank where the wild thyme blows.”

The vine upon the wall slightly behind the Shakespeare Garden Rock is a honeysuckle named for Graham Thomas, a gardener who labored less than a hundred years ago.

 In A Midsummer Night’s Dream Titania bids the ass-headed Bottom:

Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms…
So doth the woodbine and the sweet honeysuckle
Gently entwist.

The plants of my time often bloom but briefly each year. This is one of the divers cases where the gardeners here have taken a more modern form of the plant for the sake of larger flowers and longer blooming seasons. They purchased this honeysuckle through Wayside Gardens and planted it in September 1995.

In the Much Ado About Nothing Garden there is an older, highly fragrant kind of honeysuckle, whose odor is much more like the perfume mine own memory recalls. The scent of honeysuckle is justly famous, but sweet-smelling plants do not usually send forth their best odors in the heat of the full sun. Do you come back when daylight is fading!