OF GARLANDS AND CORONARY OR GARLAND PLANTS SIR,1-The use of flowery crowns and garlands is of no slender antiquity, and higher than I conceive you apprehend it. For, besides the old Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians made use hereof; who, besides the bravery of their garlands, had little birds upon them to peck their heads and brows, and so to keep them [from] sleeping at their festival compotations. This practice also extended as far as India: for at the feast of the Indian king, it is peculiarly observed by Philostratus, that their custom was to wear garlands, and come crowned with them unto their feast. The crowns and garlands of the ancients were either gestatory, such as they wore about their heads or necks; portatory, such as they carried at solemn festivals; pensile or suspensory, such as they hanged about the posts of their houses in honour of their gods, as Jupiter Thyræus or Limeneus; or else they were depository, such as they laid upon the graves and monuments of 1 This letter was written to John Evelyn (see Introduction) the dead. And these were made up after all ways of art, compactile, sutile, plectile; for which work there were σεφανοπλόκοι, or expert persons to contrive them after the best grace and propriety. Though we yield not unto them in the beauty of flowery garlands, yet some of those of antiquity were larger than any we lately met with; for we find in Athenæus, that a myrtle crown, of one and twenty feet in compass, was solemnly carried about at the Hellotian feast in Corinth, together with the bones of Europa. And garlands were surely of frequent use among them; for we read in Galen, that when Hippocrates cured the great plague of Athens by fires kindled in and about the city: the fuel thereof consisted much of their garlands. And they must needs be very frequent and of common use, the ends thereof being many. For they were convivial, festival, sacrificial, nuptial, honorary, funebrial. We who propose unto ourselves the pleasures of two senses, and only single out such as are of beauty and good odour, cannot strictly confine ourselves unto imitation of them. For, in their convivial garlands, they had respect 1 De Theriaca ad Pisonem. A unto plants preventing drunkenness, or discussing the exhalations from wine; wherein, beside roses, taking in ivy, vervain, melilote, &c., they made use of divers of small beauty or good odour. The solemn festival garlands were made properly unto their gods, and accordingly contrived from plants sacred unto such deities; and their sacrificial ones were selected under such considerations. Their honorary crowns triumphal, ovary, civical, obsidional, had little of flowers in them: and their funebrial garlands had little of beauty in them besides roses, while they made them of myrtle, rosemary, apium, &c., under symbolical intimations; but our florid and purely ornamental garlands, delightful unto sight and smell, nor framed according to any mystical and symbolical considerations, are of more free election, and so may be made to excel those of the ancients: we having China, India, and a new world to supply us, beside the great distinction of flowers unknown unto antiquity, and the varieties thereof arising from art and nature. But, beside vernal, æstival and autumnal, made of flowers, the ancients had also the hyemal garlands; contenting themselves at first with such as were made of horn dyed into several colours, and shaped into the figure of flowers, and also of es coronarium or clincquant, or brass thinly wrought out into leaves commonly known among us. But the curiosity of some emperors for such intents had roses brought from Egypt until they had found the art to produce late roses in Rome, and to make them grow in winter, as is delivered in that handsome epigram of Martial— At tu Romanæ jussus jam cedere bruma Some American nations, who do much excel in garlands, content not themselves only with flowers, but make elegant crowns of feathers, whereof they have some of greater radiancy and lustre than their flowers : and since there is an art to set into shapes, and curiously to work in choicest feathers, there could nothing answer the crowns made of the choicest feathers of some tomincios and sun birds. The catalogue of coronary plants is not large in Theophrastus, Pliny, Pollux, or Athenæus: but we may find a good enlargement in the accounts of modern botanists; and additions may still be made by successive acquists of fair and specious plants, not yet translated from foreign regions, or little known unto our gardens ; he that would be complete may take notice of these following: Aquilegia nova Hispania Cacoxochitli Recchi. Camaratinga sive Caragunta quarta Pisonis. Cambay sive Myrtus Americana. Flos Auricula (Flor de la Oreia). Rosa Indica. Zilium Indicum. Fula Magori Garcia. Champe Garcia Champacca Bontii. Daullontas frutex odoratus seu Chamamelum arbor escens Bontii. Beidelsar Alpini. Sambuc. Amberboi Turcarum. Nuphar Ægyptium. |