ROSEMARY.

Press, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20488, 5 March 1932, Page 3

ROSEMARY.

ELIZABETHAN MEMORIES. (By H." Avray . Tipping in the "Observer.") Koscmary is not merely an aroma. It is a shrub of much beauty and of aptitude for the Garden of Pleasure. People sometimes trim it into a hedge or clip •' it into a . globular-headed standard. Such uses have, their merit, •but .the form .that, Nature gtyes # is Purely the most ' sympathetic; Ifi narrow leafage, deep green above and grey below, clusters closely about its •stem, of ( which the old ones have gracefully swayed outwards while the new. ones of the season are stiffly, vertical, the grey of young stem and'under-Jeaf | standing Out in shapely, array frpm.tthe deep-green horizontal. growths of ; the past. Irregularly 'pyramidal is therefore'the general effect, and the broken

skyline should by no means be lessened by the secateur—increase it,-rather, by taking out from low down some of the upright branches if they are growing thick and close set. Such' it is" now;, and so will remain, all winter, a "pleasure" to Bye and; nose." :; And-then'} "'in '-April:, and-May, every qne/ of those many last 'season's ,vertical shoots' willdevelop, all up their foot or- eighteen inches of length, innumerable pale lavender blooms, which bees will visit in serried ranks. English/winters occasionally kill old specimens, and that .is a pity, as age adds to their pictiiresqueness. But propagation ;is easy and growth". rapid, so that replacement offers • no difficulty. ■ No wonder that this plethora of good qualities —healthful beauty of .form and flower, strangely"- "arresting - and persis- ■ tent aroma if you brush it with the hand as you. pass by— it early prominence, ritual uses,'and "Virtues'- : both hygienic and mystic. "Kosemary for remembrance^'' quoth Ophelia as to " what, long before Shakespeare's time, ' Sir Thomas More had called ' 'the herb sacred to remembrance and tp friendr , ship.'' He let it run all ov.er his garden walls, •" because my bees love it"; and Paul, Hentzner, who visited England in Queen Elizabeth's time, says that at Hampton Court "we were led into the gardens, which are' most pleasant; here j

we saw Rosemary: bo planted and nailed to'the walls as to-cover'them entirely, which is a method . exceeding common in England." This was at mnch the same date as the appearance of Gerard s "Herbal,'' and, so long had it then been , a denizen' of English gardens that it had escaped, and he tells us that it had been found growing wild in Lansachire. It was accepted as of ceremonial value on both solemn and gay occasions. "Stick your rosemary on this fair corse" is the friar's injunction when the body of Juliet is to be borne to church "in all her best array;" "Upon her grave the rosemary they threw, sings eighteenth-century Gay of a maiden's burial, and so Hood describes it" as 1 ' Dreary Rosemary that always mourns the dead." Yet - it was-equally in request for weddings, and iff "The Bride's Good-Morrow" - (Roxburgh Bal- ' lade) "yoiiiig men and iriaids do ready stand with. Sweet, Rosemary in; their hand.'' Thus. Culpeper, a doctor whoso herbal dates from the middle of the seventeenth century, and Tfho; assigns "virtues''to every, plant, tells is that rosemary "is a herb of as great use

with us as any what-so-ever, for physical but civil purposes."" v" Such purpopes are now mainly of th« past, but Bosmarinus* officinalis is > still cherished with us,'both for its~ scent and savour, and -for' its beauty of - deportment and inflorescence. In recent times a prostrate form, found in the 3slaa4 y of Capri, has been introduced;" to, gardens. • In those of the Riviera* it'is magnificent, cascading down-.walla and, banks for six or eight-feet.. . With .us it is very apt to suffer from frost. « .It will survivfe only the mildest mnters-at Ke*v, w tmtes its lath- «n»we.\ * JJrfJ, the alternation of damp and frost it especially resents, and the least pro : tection against this at its - rootfrtofck win inaXe' - I ***« often planted -it fctowall, and-where set m<the- border at the top of the wall, a hari winter had lolled it oujtright, whereas planted a little way.-down; so-as vertical and .its rootstock sheltered, by a .slightly projecting stone at thf> top of it, the whole plant, has reinaaned ever-. •green after a really hard winter.-