[008] _Crisped knots_ are figures curled or twisted, or having waving lines intersecting each other. They are sometimes planted in box. Children, even in these days, indulge their fancy in sowing mustard and cress, &c. in 'curious knots,' or in favorite names and sentences. I have done it myself, "I know not how oft,"--and alas, how long ago! But I still remember with what anxiety I watered and watched the ground, and with what rapture I at last saw the surface gradually rising and breaking on the light green heads of the delicate little new-born plants, all exactly in their proper lines or stations, like a well-drilled Lilliputian battalion.
Shakespeare makes mention of garden _knots_ in his _Richard the Second_, where he compares an ill governed state to a neglected garden.
Why should we, in the compass of a pale, Keep law, and form, and due proportion, Showing, as in a model, our firm estate? When our sea-walled garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds; her finest flowers choked up, Her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined, Her _knots_ disordered, and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars.
There is an allusion to garden _knots_ in _Holinshed's Chronicle_. In 1512 the Earl of Northumberland "had but one gardener who attended hourly in the garden for setting of erbis and _chipping of knottis_ and sweeping the said garden clean."
[009] Ovid, in his story of Pyramus and Thisbe, tells us that the black Mulberry was originally white. The two lovers killed themselves under a white Mulberry tree and the blood penetrating to the roots of the tree mixed with the sap and gave its color to the fruit.
[010] _Revived Adonis_,--for, according to tradition he died every year and revived again. _Alcinous, host of old Laertes' son_,--that is, of Ulysses, whom he entertained on his return from Troy. _Or that, not mystic_--not fabulous as the rest, but a real garden which Solomon made for his wife, the daughter of Pharoah, king of Egypt--WARBURTON
"Divested of harmonious Greek and bewitching poetry," observes Horace Walpole, "the garden of Alcinous was a small orchard and vineyard with some beds of herbs and two fountains that watered them, inclosed within a quickset hedge." Lord Kames, says, still more boldly, that it was nothing but a kitchen garden. Certainly, gardening amongst the ancient Greeks, was a very simple business. It is only within the present century that it has been any where elevated into a fine art.