People cannot survive without plants. We rely on them for food, shelter, clothes, tools – as much now as we ever did before modernity. Our relationship with plants predated the emergence of written language: that history is archaeological. But as long as we have had the words to write we have written about plants: that writing is the subject of this book. The history of literature about plants is long, rich, and varied: the task of accounting for it would demand many volumes. Nonetheless, this collection is ambitious in scope. Its sections cover historical periods of Greek, Latin, Norse, and Anglophone plant literatures; prominent modern plant genres, and the plant writing of most global regions. The scholars who took on the difficult task of accounting for a region’s plant literature have done so with elegance, many of them focusing on the long history of literature about a single plant species whose place in the region’s culture deserves attention for its sustained national, religious, or ethnic importance.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Shakespeare’s plants became the focus of popular printed books. Especially in the post-war period these volumes appear to have fed a thirst for nativist and nationalist consolation. The genre was for many years bound up with the practice – in Britain and America – of planting Shakespeare gardens in civic and public spaces. However, the popular modern culture of Shakespeare’s flowers diverts considerably from the ways in which plants appeared on the Shakespearean stage. In the plays, plants are used to question those social practices assumed to be inherently stable, even part of the natural order: kingship, Englishness, hierarchies of learning, even the very premise that plants (and the people who pick them) as themselves ‘native’. Close attention to Shakespeare’s dramatic use of plants therefore reveals a certain resistance to the very instincts – nationalist and nativist, pastoralist and conservative – for which his plants have been utilised in the last two centuries.

This chapter reads Cymbeline in the context of early modern tapestry depiction, in particular the uses of botanical motifs in medieval tapestries. It examines Cymbeline’s use of tapestries onstage as a way of recalling pre-Reformation technologies of seeing and interpreting visual texts. It asks to what extent Cymbeline, and Shakespeare’s theatre more boradly, can be understood sacramental in its conception, dramaturgy, and use of objects.

This chapter reads A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of Elizabethan botanical privateering, the trade in printed herbals, and Elizabeth I’s personal association with the pansy. It argues that privateering was an advetnure for people of all social groups through which national and civic identity was worked out in botanical terms. It looks especially at the botanically-adorned baby in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the context of early modern naval trade, national competition and the illicit movement of children.

The Elizabethan ‘Botanical Renaissance’ was a movement that touched every sphere of life: the domestic and public; the theological, political and aesthetic; the literary and proto-scientific; and the mercantile, maritime and proto-colonialist. It was embraced by members of every social sphere and took place within changing definitions of the urban and the rural, thereby encompassing people who lived in each of these settings and those who – like Shakespeare himself – lived in both. That is a big claim to make for the role of the humble plant in social and literary history, but it is the claim I will be making in this book and other scholars have begun to offer similar observations.