In the middle of Central Park, there's a particularly charming monument to the Bard.
I'm talking about a living monument.
The Shakespeare Garden.
A delightful plot of land in the Upper West part of the park,
just around the corner from the Delacorte Theater,
and all of its flowers are there....
because Shakespeare mentioned them.
"What's in a name?"
"That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet"
I had to wait until June for the roses to bloom to get good footage,
though I could have gone earlier in order to capture "the rough winds that do shake the darling buds of May".
There's also this bouquet from "The Winter's Tale".
"Here's flowers for you:"
"Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram, The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun,"
"And with him rises weeping"
And I think but can't be sure that these purple things might be viola tricolor,
Called by Shakespeare, "love-in-idleness".
The magical flower that drove people to lust in "A Midsummer Night's Dream".
I had trouble finding cowslips from the song in "The Tempest".
"Where the bee sucks their lurk I, in a cowslip's Bell I lie"
I'm sure they're here somewhere
Also missing, is Ophelia's bouquet.
“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts,"
"There’s fennel for you, and columbines;"
"there’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays.
O, you must wear your rue with a difference"
"There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when my father died"
"They say he made a good end"
Unless... it's all here, and I just missed it in all the greenery.
Late spring, early summer seems to be the best time to go.
That's when almost everything is in bloom, save for the big evergreen and back, which is always worth visiting.
"Heigh-ho the holly! Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly.
So, heigh-ho the holly"
Don't know much about gardening, to be perfectly honest. Don't know if Shakespeare did either.
Gardeners have certainly claimed him has one of their own, like everyone else in the world.
There's certainly enough floral imagery in his works to fill a sizeable plot of land.
All different species, all different,
and all they have in common is that they were mentioned by a long-dead poet,
an ecosystem of aesthetics, of poetics.
Though, I suppose all gardens are.
While I filmed, I saw a starling, another species brought to the Americas from Europe,
and one brought over solely because it was mentioned by Shakespeare.
Starlings, an ecological disaster.
As I was writing this piece, we got another report about how many species we'd lose before the century ran out.
I wonder if, of all survival traits,
being appealing to humans will be the most important in the coming centuries...
and how much will our Gardens change? The roses that grow today have mutated over generations,
so the roses that Shakespeare smelled may not be the same roses that I smell.
But ironically the name "rose" has stayed.
So, if we call the rose by any other name, would it smell as sweet?
You can hear traffic from the garden, a crossroad goes right by it.
A reminder that we're not in nature, we're in Central Park, in the center of the densest urban population in the US.
It's a reminder that the most influential species in this ecosystem is still the human,
and what we choose to sing about, write poetry about,
immortalize in word.
We may also immortalize on Earth.
Anyway, just wanted to stop and...
smell the flowers.