One likes to think that Shakespeare must have seen this garden, for we know that at least for a time he lived in the vicinity. In those days two such prominent men could scarcely have failed to know one another.[85] As Canon Ellacombe has pointed out, Shakespeare's writings are full of the old English herb lore. In this use of plant lore, which was traditional rather than literary, he is curiously distinct from his contemporaries. Outside the herbals there is more old English herb lore to be found in Shakespeare than in any other writer. It is, in fact, incredible that the man whose own works are so redolent of the fields and hedgerows of his native Warwickshire, did not visit the garden of the most famous herbarist of his day. Perhaps it was to Shakespeare that Gerard first told the sad tale of the loss of his precious scammony of Syria, a tale which no one with a gardener's heart can read without a pang of sympathy, even after the lapse of three centuries. One of his numerous correspondents had sent him the seed of this rare plant, "of which seed," he says:-- "I received two plants that prospered exceeding well; the one whereof I bestowed upon a learned apothecary of Colchester, which continueth to this day bearing both floures and ripe seed. But an ignorant weeder of my garden plucked mine up and cast it away in my absence instead of a weed, by which mischance I am not able to write hereof so absolutely as I determined. It floured in my garden about S. James' tide as I remember, for when I went to Bristow Faire I left it in floure; but at my returne it was destroyed as is aforesaid." FOOTNOTES: [76] Americans who have the proud distinction of being "of Royal Indian descent" may be interested to know that a copy of Gerard's Herbal in Oxford has been identified as having belonged to Dorothy Rolfe, the mother-in-law of the Princess Pocahontas. [77] Yew berries are an ingredient in at least one prescription in a Saxon herbal (_Leech Book of Bald_, I. 63). [78] Gerard endeavoured to induce the Barber-Surgeons' Company to establish a garden for the cultivation and study of medicinal plants, but nothing came of the scheme. [79] Formerly it was generally supposed that Gerard's garden was on the northern side of Holborn, but this is unlikely, for during the latter part of Elizabeth's reign the part which is now known as Ely Place and Hatton Garden was an estate of forty acres belonging to the Bishopric of Ely. Holborn was almost a village then, and Gerard tells us in his _Herball_ that in Gray's Inn Lane he gathered mallow, shepherd's purse, sweet woodruff, bugle and Paul's betony, and in the meadows near red-flowered clary, white saxifrage, the sad-coloured rocket, yarrow, lesser hawkweed and the curious strawberry-headed trefoil. Wallflower and golden stonecrop grew on the houses.