In every office of the palaces is a Bible, or book of acts of the church, or chronicle, for the use of whoever comes in, so that the court looks more like a university than a palace.  Would to God the houses of the nobles were ruled like the queen’s!  The nobility are followed by great troops of serving-men in showy liveries; and it is a goodly sight to see them muster at court, which, being filled with them, “is made like to the show of a peacock’s tail in the full beauty, or of some meadow garnished with infinite kinds and diversity of pleasant flowers.”  Such was the discipline of Elizabeth’s court that any man who struck another within it had his right hand chopped off by the executioner in a most horrible manner.

The English have always had a passion for gardens and orchards.  In the Roman time grapes abounded and wine was plenty, but the culture disappeared after the Conquest.  From the time of Henry iv. to Henry VIII. vegetables were little used, but in Harrison’s day the use of melons, pompions, radishes, cucumbers, cabbages, turnips, and the like was revived.  They had beautiful flower-gardens annexed to the houses, wherein were grown also rare and medicinal herbs; it was a wonder to see how many strange herbs, plants, and fruits were daily brought from the Indies, America and the Canaries.  Every rich man had great store of flowers, and in one garden might be seen from three hundred to four hundred medicinal herbs.  Men extol the foreign herbs to the neglect of the native, and especially tobacco, “which is not found of so great efficacy as they write.”  In the orchards were plums, apples, pears, walnuts, filberts; and in noblemen’s orchards store of strange fruit-apricots, almonds, peaches, figs, and even in some oranges, lemons, and capers.  Grafters also were at work with their artificial mixtures, “dallying, as it were, with nature and her course, as if her whole trade were perfectly known unto them:  of hard fruits they will make soft, of sour sweet, of sweet yet more delicate; bereaving also some of their kernels, others of their cores, and finally endowing them with the flavor of musk, amber, or sweet spices at their pleasure.”  Gardeners turn annual into perpetual herbs, and such pains are they at that they even used dish-water for plants.  The Gardens of Hesperides are surely not equal to these.  Pliny tells of a rose that had sixty leaves on one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that had one hundred and eighty leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of it for ten pounds, but he thought it a “tickle hazard.”  In his own little garden, of not above three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred samples, and not one of them of the common, or usually to be had.