‘Hortus Mertonensis’: John Earle's garden poem of 1620

Abstract

The Renaissance identified hortus as either an orchard or a garden. The word's ancestry may be traced in part to the hortus conclusus of the Middle Ages, a spiritual garden depicted as an orchard. Robert Burton quotes St. Bernard on the consolations of such a garden in his Anatomy of Melancholy, and the spiritual comforts and instruction to be derived from such gardens continued to be the burden of English books both of emblems and on gardening throughout the first half of the 17th century. Not surprisingly, the doctrinal aspect of all this is most evident in the work of the Roman Catholic, Henry Hawkins, the Parthenia Sacra (1633). Protestant emblem-writers like Henry Peacham, however, stress the moral instruction a garden offers: in his Minerva Britannia (1612) he writes: