We visited the Shakespeare Garden in the Wynton M. Blount Cultural Park in Montgomery; it’s just outside the grounds of the Shakespeare Festival which is putting on Macbeth early next year, a play I think I saw there back in high school. My favorite way to read Shakespeare then: those books with his language on one side of the fold, and everyday English on the other.
The garden here includes plants and Elizabethan herbs mentioned in Shakespeare’s poems and plays. It’s maintained by the Capital City Master Gardeners.
The plants here include rosemary, honeysuckle, Asiatic lilies, narcissus and roses.
This plaque reads
Rose
Rosa “LaMarque”
“When I have pluck’d the rose, I cannot give it vital growth again.”
OTHELLO 5.2.13
The plaque for rosemary reads:
Rosemary
Rosemarinus prostratus
“There’s rosemary,
that’s for remembrance…”
HAMLET 4.5.176
In Shreveport, we visited the Biblical Garden & Orchard at Agudath Achim — it was started just last year.
Here’s a Biblical Garden in Rhode Island with markers that “show how each plant is connected to Jewish tradition, the Bible, and the Land of Israel.”
The best known, most established of these may be at Rodef Shalom in Pittsburgh. From their website:
Enter a replica of ancient Israel in our Biblical Botanical Garden with more than 100 temperate and tropical plants. See the land of the Bible, the Holy Land, in a setting with a cascading waterfall, a desert, a bubbling stream, the Jordan, which meanders through the garden from Lake Kineret to the Dead Sea.