The King lear garden

video guide transcript

[Shakespeare]: Here is the King Lear Garden.

[Interlocutor]: What are the plants you, Will Shakespeare, use in King Lear?

[Shakespeare]: Vines, oaks, hawthorn, and cork; lily and flax, balm and rosemary and sweet marjoram; apple and crab, peascod and samphire, oats and corn; burdock, darnel, fumiter, hemlock, furrow-weeds, nettles, and cuckoo-flowers.

[Interlocutor]: Darnel? Fumiter? Cuckoo-flowers? You gave several names I don’t recognize.

[Shakespeare]: Perchance you are no farmer. Those are weeds that hinder the growth of a crop in the field. Towards the end of the play, when the king is mad, those who seek to rescue him hear that he is

As mad as the vex'd sea; singing aloud;
Crown'd with rank fumiter and furrow-weeds,
With burdocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo-flowers,
Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow
In our sustaining corn.

During his reign his crown was the glory of a wide and rich realm; now, in his madness, his crown is the weeds which, unchecked, will choke the harvest. There are several plants called “cuckoo-flower” in several parts of England. You can see one of them in this Garden.

Another is a certain plant you call a wild geranium, which the folk of my native Warwickshire call a “cuckoo-flower” to this day. The name is all the more fitting in mad Lear’s crown because the cuckoo is notorious for laying her eggs in another other bird’s nest so that her chick usurps the food which the mother bird brings after the eggs hatch -- just as the weeds in Lear’s crown usurp the place of the crops.

[Interlocutor]: You mentioned another plant I don’t know, too: samphire. What is that?

[Shakespeare]: Samphire grows on rocks and cliffs round the coast of England, in the moist salt air. There is samphire here -- not in the King Lear Garden, but in the Highlight Garden. The gardeners feared at first that it would not consent to grow in Colorado, but it thrived. Perhaps it takes the stone of the wall hard by to be its proper cliff! However, the attempt to grow it here in this garden as well was not successful.

In my day we ate samphire in pickle, and so the harvest of samphire was a goodly trade. But it was dangerous. To reach the plants, those who picked it dangled from the edge of the cliff on long ropes.

Now in the play Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, persuades both his father and his legitimate half-brother Edgar that each has laid a plot to kill the other. Edgar flees; Gloucester has his eyes put out through Edmund’s treachery. The blinded Gloucester seeks nothing but his own death. Edgar meets him, but does not dare to say who he truly is; he disguises his voice. To save his father’s life, he pretends to lead him to the top of a cliff where he may leap to his death. Gloucester does not, as he would expect, hear the waves, but Edgar satisfies him by saying that they are too high for that sound to reach them, and by speaking of the dizzy and dreadful sight of the cliff:

Halfway down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head.

[Interlocutor]: You make me shudder. But you include other, more familiar plants—peas, apples, rosemary, lilies—they are, at least, more comfortable?

[Shakespeare]: This is not a comfortable play. Perhaps you might call the flax comfortable. There is flax here in this Garden, and in the play a servant brings flax and whites of eggs to Gloucester after his blinding, for we thought such a poultice could help bloody head wounds. The lily is here in this Garden too; but it comes into the play only in the mouth of a devoted follower of King Lear, who makes “lily-livered” [King Lear II ii] but one of the many terms of abuse he showers on one who was insolent to his master.

Rosemary is no comfort in this play neither. Edgar speaks of it when he devises his disguise as a homeless madman, one of the

Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb'd and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary.

As for the apples and peas—well, the tale of King Lear is an old one: the aged king who divides his kingdom among his daughters according to the measure of their love for him, foolishly taking the fulsome professions of love from the elder two as truth and rejecting their quiet younger sister, the only one who loves him in truth. When once the older two have his kingdom, their lack of love swiftly grows apparent. But Lear is unwilling to know it; when one of them shows him unkindness, he is still sure the other will do no such thing. His fool is wiser than that, and says to him:

FOOL: Shalt see thy other daughter will use thee kindly;
for though she's as like this as a crab's like an
apple, yet I can tell what I can tell.

LEAR: Why, what canst thou tell, my boy?

FOOL: She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab.

To understand the fool, you must know that when we spoke of a crab, we meant what you call the crab-apple. We made much use of crabs. But in our day as in yours, the crab was far sourer than other apples. Thus the fool says that Lear’s two unloving daughters might seem only somewhat alike, but they will prove more alike than they seem: not one sour and the other sweet, but each just as sour as the other. Their harshness soon diminishes their father to “a shealed peascod” as the Fool calls him [King Lear I v], with every protection stripped from him.

Nay, this play has little comfort to offer and, as always, I strove to fit the plants to the play.