Jack Cade, nervous lawyers, and the weeds of disorder

"Now 'tis the spring, and the weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden,
And choke the herbs for want of husbandry."

                                                                 King Henry VI - Part 2    (III, i)



Clearly, it's Queen Margaret, not her weak-willed husband King Henry VI, that wears the pants in their royal household. Ambitious, disloyal subjects are the weeds Margaret has in mind.

Shakespeare paints an enigmatic portrait of King Henry as sincerely pious but too reflective and indecisive for his own good, at least by the standards of this world. Margaret sees her husband's enemies as choking weeds taking over the garden of state; it was a metaphor often used during the European Renaissance to describe the threat of disorder in a supposedly civil society that valued order above virtually everything else. To the Renaissance mind, a well-tended garden was the very picture of the idealized state.

Later in Shakespeare's play, a weed of disorder would rise up most memorably in the person of the raffish Jack Cade, the leader of a commoners' revolt that, if nothing else, gave the playwright a chance to write the immortal line of one rebel, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."      (IV, ii)

Weeds, whether of the botanical or metaphorical variety, are routinely rooted out of the Tradescant Garden of Agecroft Hall, thanks to its diligent staff of gardeners. Pictured above in a view taken last year, the garden's name honors John Tradescant, the first Englishman to travel to Virginia in order to bring indigenous botanical specimens from the colony back to England. After a visit in 1637, he returned with a variety of plants to add to a collection that his father had begun as gardener to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria.

In more recent years, the names "Henrietta" and "Maria" lived on as names for two cats that used to roam the gardens and grounds of Agecroft Hall.

Native Virginia plants that can frequently be seen in the Tradescant Garden in proper season include Tradescantia virginiana or spiderwort, and Lobelia cardinalis or cardinal flower. A wide range of other plants that Tradescant would been familiar with are also grown, varying from year to year.
Agecroft Hall also features its Sunken Garden, designed by the landscape architect Charles Gillette and based on a garden at the Hampton Court Palace of King Henry VIII.

Tulips abound in the Sunken Garden during much of April each year.  Shakespeare passed away too early to witness the "tulipmania" that engulfed much of western Europe in the seventeenth century, with wealthy English patrons offering incredible sums of money for particular tulip varieties. It all must have been enough to make for a madcap comedy.