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Gardens at Hampton Court.

The kitchen garden provided vegetables, flowers for ornament and preserving, and herbs. The herbs were sent both to the kitchen, where they were used generously in cookery, and to the housewife's private room, her "closet," where they were distilled for medicinal uses.

This woodcut is from the title page of Thomas Hill's The Gardener's Labyrinth (1577). On the left is a pump, on the right a bower of the kind possibly used as a prop on stage. As the illustration shows, Elizabethan gardens were ordered, often with intricate designs for the paths. From Shakespeare's England (1917).

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