William Shakespeare was one of the greatest and most versatile writers the world has ever seen. In his plays, poems and sonnets he names 180 different plants. He was not a botanist but mostly use the old English words, which everyone was familiar with, to describe the flowers he wrote about. Many of his plays were written for a certain time of the year, and but it is the spring that Shakespeare most enjoyed.
Go bid her steal into the pleached bower,
Where honeysuckles ripen’d by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter like favourites
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride,
Against that power that bred it.
In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero asked Margaret to persuade Beatrice to hide in a honeysuckle bower, planning that she would overhear the conversation about how much Benedict loves Beatrice. In designer, Emma Bossons’ vase her honeysuckle bower is entwined with purple woodbine. In Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of the 11th century, the word woodbine applied to wild clematis and Shakespeare would have been familiar with its botanical associations, as at the time of his writing it was the name given very loosely to almost any creeping or climbing plant. These two plants are ripened by the sun and are captured in full bloom on this limited edition vase.
