Eleanour Sinclair Rohde

"The most famous of Elizabethan gardening authorities was , who came of a well-known family. When he left , Hugh Platt became a member of , and being given a generous allowance by his father he was able to devote many years to literary work. He became keenly interested in and agriculture and was in communication with all the authorities in this country. His own gardens at , , and were famous, and his (reprinted later under the title of The Garden of Eden) is full of information gleaned in all parts of England ..."

"For the gardens of the few who can give them warm walls in the most sheltered parts of Great Britain, two scented January-flowering treasures are ' and Freylinia cestroides. With its globe-shaped head of flowers, ranging from deep butter to cream-colour on the same head (the flowers turn cream-colour as they fade), its sweet scent and the length of time it remains in bloom, E. chrysantha is a most attractive plant, and the buff-coloured flowers of fill the air with fragrance in mid-winter."

"In midwinter, when few fresh herbs except , , , , and are available, dried herbs can be used, also or ..."

"The most attractive time in is in spring when the bank sloping from the terrace is thick with s and ."

"Queen Elizabeth came twice to Oxford: once in 1566 and again in 1592."

"The oldest book dealing with the virtue of herbs is the , circa 900–950. This Leech Book was evidently the manual of a Saxon doctor and it is the oldest existing Leech Book written in the ."

", of the most noted of the day, entered the service of the as an assistant gardener. In 1826 he was made head-gardener. His name at is chiefly associated with the remarkable he designed, which was begun in 1836 and finished in 1840."

"Even in only very wealthy men had separate gardens merely for pleasure, whilst all the small s and s throughout the country still retained the old . For over seven centuries before that time, all the gardens in England were herb gardens, and very beautiful they must have been, for s, , s, , , , , s, , s, and s were all used as herbs."

"Of s we knew nothing till we learnt about them from the s; and they were only introduced into England in . It was about the same time that s were first cultivated in this country, but s were unknown till . The is an indigenous plant in the , but of the we were ignorant till the Flemish immigrants in the early seventeenth century introduced them. To them also we owe our present garden , which has had a long journey to reach us, for it is said to have come from Asia through Spain. The was used by our ancestors from , and one of the Saxon names for March was "sprout-kale month"; but otherwise the whole ' tribe were unknown to us till the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."