The Yard and Garden

Women in the Yard

Para1The yard of a early modern English home, especially one in the countryside, was an area of life where the housewife or other woman was likely in charge. Cottages, manors, mansions, and castles all likely had a vegetable garden, poultry house, dairy, buttery, stable, storehouse, distillery, pantry, and pigsty, most of which were overseen by women.
Para2As John Fitzherbert’s 1525 Book of Husbandry recommends, Thou must […] serve thy swine, both morning and evening, and give thy pullen fowl meat food in the morning, and when time of the year cometh, thou must take heed how thy hen, ducks and geese do lay, and to gather up their eggs […] Women also managed much of the household’s vegetable production through tilling, planting, weeding, and harvesting from a kitchen garden. The kitchen garden provided vegetables, flowers for ornament and preserving, plus herbs for enhancing the taste of food and which were also crucial to yield the many herbal remedies for treating ailments of all sorts.
Para3Comfrey, thyme, rosemary, daisy, hyssop, lavender, marigold, poppy, tansy, and, of course, rose were frequently grown for their beauty, their fragrant leaves and flowers, as well as their potential as medicine. The herbs were sent both to the kitchen, where they were used generously in cookery, and to the housewife’s private room, her closet, where they were prepared for the family’s medicinal uses. There, these herbal products were made into syrups, distillations of essential oils, waters, and poultices.
Para4Gardening books began to be published frequently in the Elizabethan period, including Thomas Hill’s 1568 The Profitable Art of Gardening, which he retitled and republished under a pseudonym as The Gardner’s Labyrinth in 1577. In addition to advice on the merits of human dung versus animal dung as fertilizer, he includes advice on growing exotic fruits such as melons, lemons, oranges, dates, and pomegranates through the use of rolling planters to maximize sun exposure and which could be rolled indoors during winter.
Para5Flower gardens, especially those with decorative plants, were a sign of status for wealthier households and could enhance property value. For the gentry and emerging middle class, ornamental gardens became a way to display taste and refinement, influenced by Renaissance and design trends, especially those from Italy. The knot garden, an ornamental garden of elaborate geometric designs created by borders grown from the evergreen shurb box Buxus sempervirens were especially popular for wealthier homes starting in the 16th century.

Key Print Sources

Hill, Thomas. The Gardener’s Labyrinth. 1577. Oxford UP, 1987.
Orlin, Lena Cowen. Elizabethan Households: An Anthology. Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995.
Picard, Liza. Elizabeth’s London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London. St. Martin’s Press, 2003.

Key Online Sources

Best, Michael. A “Knot” or Design for a Garden. Shakespeare’s Life and Times. Internet Shakespeare Editions, https://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/society/huswifery/gardenknot.html. Accessed 19 Mar. 2023.
Coleman, Julie. The Gardner’s Labyrinth. University of Glasgow Library, May 2001, https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/month/may2001.html.
French, Esther. The Elizabethan Garden: 11 Plants Shakespeare Would Have Known Well. The Folger Shakespeare Library, 31 May 2016, https://www.folger.edu/blogs/shakespeare-and-beyond/elizabethan-garden-plants-shakespeare/.

Prosopography

Kate McPherson

Kate McPherson is Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Utah Valley University (Orem, UT, USA). In 2015, she began working to redevelop Shakespeare’s Life and Times, created by Michael Best, into the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Her other publications include commentary on Pericles and The Comedy of Errors for the New Oxford Shakespeare (2016); the co-edited volumes Stages of Engagement: Drama and Religion in Post-Reformation England with James Mardock (Duquesne University Press, 2014) and Shakespeare Expressed: Page, Stage, and Classroom in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, with Kathryn M. Moncrief and Sarah Enloe (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2013). With Kathryn M. Moncrief, Kate has also two edited collections, Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England: Gender, Instruction, and Performance (Ashgate, 2011) and Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate 2008). She has also published numerous articles on early modern maternity in scholarly journals. Kate participated in the 2008 National Endowment for the Humanities Institute, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars: The Study, the Stage, the Classroom, at the American Shakespeare Center. She also served as Play Seminar Director, a public humanities position, for the Utah Shakespeare Festival in 2017 and 2018.

Leah Hamby

Leah Hamby is the primary encoder for the Early Modern England Encyclopedia. Aside from encoding, she also works as an editor for the project and contributed several articles of her own. She has been working on the EMEE since February 2023. As of February 2026, she is soon to graduate with honours from Utah Valley University with a major in history and a minor in creative writing. Her other work with the LEMDO program includes remediating William Kemp’s Kemp’s Nine Day’s Wonder for the Digital Renaissance Editions.

Mahayla Galliford

Project manager, 2025-present; research assistant, 2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated with a BA (Hons with distinction) from the University of Victoria in 2024. Mahayla’s undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry. Mahayla continues her studies through UVic’s English MA program and her SSHRC-funded thesis project focuses on editing and encoding girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s dramatic entertainments, in collaboration with LEMDO.

Orgography

LEMDO Team (LEMD1)

The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators, encoders, and remediating editors.

University of Victoria (UVIC1)

https://www.uvic.ca/

Metadata

Authority title The Yard and Garden
Type of text Critical
Publisher University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online Platform
Series Early Modern England Encyclopedia
Source
By Kate McPherson, inspired by Michael Best’s Shakespeare’s Life and Times,Internet Shakespeare Editions
Editorial declaration This document uses Canadian English spelling
Edition Released with Early Modern England Encyclopedia 1.0a
Sponsor(s)

Early Modern England Encyclopedia

Anthology Leads: Kate McPherson and Kate Moncrief.
Encoding description Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding Guidelines
Document status published, peer-reviewed
Funder(s) Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
Mitacs Globalink Research Internship
Utah Valley University
License/availability
Unless otherwise noted, intellectual copyright in EMEE Anthology pages is held by Kate McPherson on behalf of the contributors. Copyright on the TEI-XML markup is held by the University of Victoria on behalf of the LEMDO Team. The content and TEI-XML markup in this file are licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. This file is freely downloadable without permission under the following conditions: (1) credit must be given to the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO in any subsequent use of the files and /or data; (2) this availability statement must remain in the file; (3) the content cannot be adapted or repurposed (except for quotations for the purposes of academic review and citation); and (4) commercial uses are not permitted without the knowledge and consent of the authors, EMEE, and LEMDO. Neither the content nor the code in this file is licensed for training large language models (LLMs), ingestion into an LLM, or any use in any artificial intelligence applications; such uses are considered to be commercial uses and are strictly prohibited.