Pick a rose. Any rose.

"Prick not your finger as you pluck it off,
Lest bleeding you do paint the white rose red,
And fall on my side so, against your will."

                                                            1 Henry VI, (II, iv)


Gardens tend to play metaphoric roles in a number of Shakespeare's plays: the playwright clearly liked the image of an unweeded garden as symbolic of human corruption, of the natural order of things thrown into disarray, of chaos run amok. By the same token, a well-kept garden was like a well-kept state: everything was where it belonged, and no weeds abounded to threaten the established order, the rule of law, the beatific peace of an undisturbed home.

In Shakespeare's lines quoted above, the Earl of Somerset, backing the House of Lancaster in its deadly struggles with the House of York, has chosen a red rose in London's Temple Garden as a symbol of the Lancastrian cause, and challenges Vernon, a Yorkist, to weigh the consequences of choosing to fight for the other side. Vernon has in turn plucked a white rose, signifying his continued allegiance to Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York. At stake in the conflict: the English throne.

Thus begins the Wars of the Roses: decades of bloodshed between the two factions that King Henry VI, weak when he wasn't insane, couldn't stop. It finally took Henry Tudor to do that. He reigned as Henry VII and had a royal son who grew up to prove himself a great juggler of wives.

Agecroft Hall's Sunken Garden was designed by the noted landscape architect Charles Gillette (1886-1968), whose garden layout pays tribute to the Pond Garden at Hampton Court Palace near London. The ill-tempered Henry VIII took the palace from his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, in 1529 after Wolsey proved ineffective at obtaining a papal annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It's probably safe to assume that Henry's new flame, Anne Boleyn, liked the gardens as well as the massive palace.

She had evidently persuaded Henry that Wolsey was reluctant to fall out of favor with the pope, didn't really approve of Henry's marital rearrangement, and was trying to slow down the course of events to a snail's pace. Wolsey, accused of treason, would have probably lost his head if he had not fallen ill and died, probably from justifiable anxiety.