The Knot Garden
Audio guide transcript
[Shakespeare]: The Knot Garden. Knot gardens first appeared in England in the reign of my Queen Elizabeth. They took their design from shapes in mathematics, limned by paths in edges of boxwood, cotton lavender, and germander. The designs of the Tudor gardens was made to mirror the design of the magnificent buildings around them, as meant to be viewed from the building’s upper windows. It was from this height that one best savored the intricate patterns. Only wealthy people had such knot gardens. The lowly houses of lesser folk, even if they could spare the land, had no upper windows.
Our Knot Garden here is not of the most common; the usual square or lengthened square as further adorned by the interchained double knot in the middle. All the same, it is full orderly as is proper to a knot garden. We prized this order, for disorder threatened everyone then as it does now. In the play Richard II, the under-gardener complains of the struggle to keep order in a garden while all the land is in disorder:
Why should we in the compass of a pale
Keep law and form and due proportion,
Showing as a model of our firm estate,
When our sea-walled garden, the whole land,
Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all upturned, her hedges ruined,
Her knots disordered and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?
The outer border of our Knot Garden is boxwood; the next border inward is thyme. The knots themselves are composed of lavender and winter savory. Our pattern places roses in the four corners and a row of yews next to a row of pink-flowered roses called The Fairy. You can see another yew in the very middle. Along the wall is a dwarf mock oranges and dwarf lilac bushes.
An oft-repeated line from Love’s Labours Lost speaks of
the west corner of the curious knotted garden
That particular garden belongs to the King of Navarre. Perhaps it is there he and his three friends meet the French princess and their ladies...even though the gentlemen have sworn to avoid women and love not for three years for study and fasting.
Knot gardens were often quite large; imagine these buildings were your home, whence you might look down upon a knot garden that filled the entire courtyard. Imagine further that all your large family dwelt together in this house, whose every room served several functions. The knot garden could become and indeed was meant as almost another room in the house, bounded round by low hedges but open in the middle: a perfect place for private talk because you can see others approaching before they can hear what you are saying.
But stay! you might think my plays show much overhearing in gardens: Love’s Labours Lost, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night. Yes, it is so. But let us remember the bower, or arbor, found in many large knotted gardens. Where there is an arbor, there can be concealment. Everyone knows that.
I will hide me in an arbor
says Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing; and those to whom he listens know it too. Indeed, they rely upon it, to make him think that the fictions they will tell over are true and deep secrets.
The knot garden with high hedges can easily become a maze, a very handsome complement to the pretty low-hedged knot gardens with their open beds and orderly display of flowers. A maze garden was an opulent thing, found mainly among the nobility, who held wide lands and could be devoted to such a grand project. In such a large, high-hedged knot garden, the opportunity to keep unseen and yet listen to others talk was everywhere.
The movies of your time often take advantage of real knot gardens. On our stage, either out of doors at the Globe or within the Blackfriars, there were no hedges, high or low, real or feigned. For the most part we worked without such things to set our scenes. It was for me to make plain and lively in the actors’ words what the audience would then imagine from their own experience.