Shakespeare Gardens Around the World Honor the Playwright—and Hold Their Own Storied History

The curated plots of flowers, herbs and trees serve as windows into Shakespeare’s work and life

Mary Randolph | Correspondent

April 8, 2026

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Head to New York, Paris, Johannesburg or Dunedin, New Zealand, and you might stumble upon a similar garden in each place. Within its geometric structure, perhaps pansies, thyme and a crab apple tree grow, with a sundial here and a line from one of William Shakespeare’s plays there. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet” is plucked from Romeo and Juliet. “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows” comes from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember: and there is pansies, that’s for thoughts” stems from Hamlet.

Chances are you’ve found a Shakespeare garden—an homage to William Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era (1558-1603) in the form of a curated plot of herbs, plants and flowers all explicitly mentioned in the Bard’s plays and sonnets. Since the first one was planted in England in the late 19th century, dozens have sprung up worldwide, from college campuses in the American Midwest to botanical gardens in Germany.

Todd Borlik, a researcher at Purdue University who studies Shakespeare’s connection to nature, says the global popularity of Shakespeare gardens reflects a natural human desire. “This desire for a horticultural oasis is as old as the myth of the Garden of Eden,” he says. “The Shakespearean garden seems in some ways to be a secular equivalent of that primal myth.”

What is a Shakespeare garden?

In his works, Shakespeare references a whopping 175 species of plants—a reflection of his “intimacy and rapport with nature” and a near-expert knowledge of horticultural, says Borlik.

“The sheer volume of species in Shakespeare’s poetry is an index of his attentiveness to the natural world,” Borlik says. “He must have sensed in it a kind of creativity that his own imagination resonated with that he tried to rival in his work.”

Shakespeare gardens include plants that the playwright refers to in his work, and more broadly, they reflect the gardens that Shakespeare himself would have had or experienced during the Elizabethan era. These were often “cottage-style” gardens, with densely packed beds of flowers and herbs cut by geometric paths and surrounded by hedges.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Shakespeare Garden features more than 80 plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s works, including tulips, lettuces, berries and asters, alongside relevant quotes. Madelyn Ringold-Brown, its gardener and curator, says her planning each year involves a mix of historical, literary and horticultural research.

“I’m always trying to add more Shakespeare plants or add more interesting Shakespeare plants that we haven’t used before,” she says.

At the Shakespeare Garden at Platt Fields Park in Manchester, England, volunteers try to plant things that will bloom at different points in the year for varying seasonal experiences, says project lead Kattie Kinkaid: roses, honeysuckle, daisies, lavender, marigolds and poppies in the summer, for example, and pansies and columbine in the fall.

“It’s almost like being a conductor,” she says, “and you go, ‘OK, now this is your chance to shine, and now this bit.’”

Kinkaid describes stepping into the garden—which also features a human sun clock (where the user’s shadow indicates the time) and regularly holds performances and readings of Shakespeare’s work—as “hugely uplifting.”

Manchester’s Shakespeare Garden was first planted in 1922, though it had fallen into disarray until Kinkaid and a group of volunteers began restoring it five years ago. Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s original Shakespeare Garden was established at around the same time as its Mancunian counterpart, in 1925, though it was moved to a new location in 1979 to make it more accessible to the public.

Both gardeners note that the many years of planting make for some surprises when things bloom each season.

“There’s a rich seedbed of self-seeding annuals, so a lot of really fun things happen in the garden by chance, which adds a lot to the cottage garden aesthetic,” Ringold-Brown says. “There’s thistle flowering in a different place every year, or Queen Anne’s [lace] pops up in different locations.”

Shakespeare gardens have their own storied history

The first Shakespeare garden was planted in London in 1892. In his book The Quest for Shakespeare’s Garden, Roy Strong explains that the planting was a reaction to a gardening trend at the time called “bedding out,” which saw gardeners importing nonnative plants from South America to English gardens. J.J. Sexby, the first chief officer of the London County Council Parks Department, wanted to revive the cottage-style garden with native English plants.

Borlik says contemporary urban gardeners were also craving a return to more rural gardening practices of the past.

“There’s this desire to recreate a historical garden as gardening and farming is becoming more industrialized,” he says. “The backlash against that is to look to a distant past where the gardening was done in a more hands-on manner.”

For other early Shakespeare gardens, the appeal was in showcasing intellect and building social capital. The Shakespeare Garden at New Zealand’s Dunedin Botanic Garden was planted in 1913, just 65 years after the city’s founding. A member of the Dunedin Shakespeare Society had visited England and proposed the project, says Alice Lloyd-Fitt, the garden’s propagation manager.

As an English colony, Lloyd-Fitt says, New Zealand prioritized sites and offerings that would attract European immigrants.

“These things, like universities and botanic gardens and museums, were all signs of a mature city and somewhere that immigrants would be keen to come to,” she adds. “Shakespeare gardens are a continuation of those things.”

Many Shakespeare gardens in England and the U.S. were planned for 1916, to mark the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, but when World War I broke out, in 1914, England abandoned many of those plans. One garden in Manchester, created by Shakespeare scholar Rosa Grindon, did come to fruition for the tercentenary and inspired the current garden in Platt Fields Park.

Outside of the one at Platt Fields Park, Kinkaid knows of only two other sites with Shakespeare gardens in all of England: one at Lightwoods Park in Sandwell, and those at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, which features five museums and gardens in the poet’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. The gardens within the Birthplace Trust include those at Shakespeare’s childhood home, his wife’s childhood home and his home later in life. Sian Cooper, the gardens manager for the trust, says these gardens have evolved under the supervision of different curators and gardeners. “These people have built this story,” she says. “It’s not just Shakespeare; it’s everyone who’s had a hand in it.”

The plans for American Shakespeare gardens, though, continued since the U.S. did not join the war until later. The memorials popped up across the country, including in Central Park and on university campuses from Northwestern in Illinois to the University of Massachusetts.

“A lot of Americans started creating them as an equivalent to the British victory garden,” Borlik says. “So Americans who wanted to support England in the war started growing these Shakespeare gardens.”

American Shakespeare gardens continued to bloom throughout the 20th century, and Wikipedia currently lists 29 across the U.S. The Illinois and Colorado Shakespeare Festivals each include a garden honoring the playwright, as do more than 15 college campuses, where students can roam the neatly laid paths or sit among rose vines.

Borlik says he knows of no other literary figures with this type of horticultural legacy. Some people throughout history have assumed that “Shakespeare was the true mirror of Nature, and therefore his plants and garden lore should be deemed worthy of study and respect,” Strong writes in his book.

Why do these gardens matter?

When he teaches The Winter’s Tale, Borlik brings to his class all the species of flowers mentioned in a famed monologue by the female character Hermione. This gives his students, many of whom he calls “ecologically illiterate,” a chance to tangibly interact with Shakespeare’s work and the nature in it.

Shakespeare gardens, Borlik says, hold similar teaching value.

“When you ask students to engage with literary texts about the natural world, and they have no connection to the species that are being named, they have no sensual experience; the reading becomes very arid,” he says. “But if they can go to a Shakespeare garden and literally stop and smell the roses—the primroses, the columbine—suddenly there’s a lot more sensual pleasure in reading.”

Shakespeare’s connection to the natural world can teach us about not only his work but also the poet himself. Little information is available about Shakespeare’s life, but his property records have survived the centuries, giving us “strange access to the places where he spent his time,” Ringold-Brown says.

Cooper explains that the gardens in Stratford-upon-Avon and the broader area provide an understanding of the setting that inspired Shakespeare’s work.

“You can see a lot of the type of imagery that he tries to conjure,” Cooper says. “It’s the lush countryside, the woodlands. You can really see the impact that where he grew up had on his view of the world and his storytelling.”

Shakespeare gardens were a horticultural trend, and, as such, they have gone in and out of fashion. Dunedin’s Shakespeare Garden still contains some plants from the poet’s works, but in the 1970s, it became part of a larger, aesthetically oriented garden, Lloyd-Fitt says. The garden at New Place, Shakespeare’s later home, has a more modern design than other Shakespeare gardens, Cooper notes, and sculptures related to Shakespeare’s work are scattered throughout.

As these gardens adapt to modern tastes and priorities, curators are also thinking about how to maintain them in the changing climate. Many flowers in the gardens are no longer found in the wild, Borlik says, and are at risk of going extinct in the next few hundred years as the planet continues to warm.

At the Birthplace Trust, Cooper says, one of her personal priorities has been to ensure that the gardens are biodiverse and resilient. She hopes that they will remain a part of Shakespeare’s legacy for many years to come.

“Being able to be a small part of the story of these gardens, which have been around long before me and will be around long after me—that’s something that I definitely don’t take for granted,” she says.

Mary Randolph | Read More

Mary Randolph is a former editorial intern with Smithsonian magazine.