This graceful volume is the marriage of Shakespeare’s words about plants and the plants themselves. It beautifully combines my love of Shakespeare and of gardening. Seeing what each plant looks like, their faces if you will, is fascinating, and incredibly helpful, especially with the more obscure ones.
My penchant for gardening came during my time with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford—the physicality of the material and the material world of plants sort of converged. There I developed a passion for the countryside—the gold and green of the landscape, the changing colours and textures of the seasons, the scent of damp earth and pungent wildflowers.
It’s the experience of each that provides the thrill: getting your hands dirty, diving down to the root of it all, finding the real joy of growth. “Joy’s soul lies in the doing,” says Shakespeare’s Cressida, and it’s true.
Nature has become a passion and a tonic for me so finding a way to keep it close is a priority [I even made a garden outside my trailer in Lithuania while shooting Elizabeth I]. It satisfies what I call my appetite for solitude.
How delightful then that this elegant book contains all of Shakespeare’s words about plants beside exquisite drawings of the plants themselves. You can sit with it in solitude and have a direct experience of each plant. You can almost touch or smell each one. Maybe it will make you want to do that—feel the spiky thorns of the rose or the fuzzy heads of burdock. I hope so. I love the fact that the olives I grow in my garden appear in six different plays, plus a sonnet [107]: “Peace proclaims Olives of endless age.”
— Helen Mirren
OPHELIA, Hamlet [Act IV, sc. 5]