Lord Zouche was another horticulturist of note. His fine garden at
Hackney contained plants that he himself collected on his travels in
Austria, Italy, and Spain. Lord Zouche gave his garden into the keeping
of the distinguished Mathias de Lobel, a famous physician and botanist
of Antwerp and Delft. Lobel was made botanist to James I and had a
great influence upon flower culture in England. For him the Lobelia was
named--an early instance of naming plants for a person and breaking
away from the quaint descriptive names for flowers.
Elizabethan gardens owed much to Nicholas Leate, or Lete, a London
merchant who about 1590 became a member of the Levant Company. As a
leading merchant in the trade with Turkey and discharging in connection
with commercial enterprise the duties of a semi-political character,
Leate became wealthy and was thus able to indulge his taste for flowers
and anything else he pleased. He had a superb garden and employed
collectors to hunt for specimens in Turkey and Syria. His "servant
at Aleppo" sent many new flowers to London, such as tulips, certain
kinds of lilies,--the martagon, or Turk's Cap, for instance,--irises,
the Crown-Imperial, and many new anemones, or windflowers. The latter
became the rage, foreshadowing the tulip-mania of later years. Nicholas
Leate also imported the yellow Sops-in-Wine, a famous carnation from
Poland, which had never been heard of before in England, and the
beautiful double yellow rose from Constantinople. Leate was a member
of the Worshipful Company of Ironmongers, London, and Master of it
in 1616, 1626, and 1627, and his portrait, given here, said to be by
Daniel Mytens, hung in Ironmongers' Hall in London until this famous
building was destroyed by a German bomb in 1917. Leate died in 1630.
[Illustration: NICHOLAS LEATE]
Leate, being a most enthusiastic flower fancier and garden lover, not
only imported rare specimens but tried many experiments. Indeed we are
surprised in going through old garden manuals of Shakespearean days to
see how many and how varied were the attempts to produce "sports" and
novelties. We read of grafting a rosebush and placing musk in the cleft
in an effort to produce musk-roses; recipes for changing the color of
flowers; methods for producing double flowers; and instructions for
grafting and pruning plants, sowing seeds, and plucking flowers during
the increase, or waning, of the moon.
These professional florists and gentlemen amateurs valued their rare
specimens from foreign countries as they valued their emeralds from
Peru, Oriental pearls from Ceylon and rubies from India. Parkinson says
very earnestly:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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