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The English have always had a passion for gardens and orchards. In the Roman time grapes abounded and wine was plenty, but the culture disappeared after the Conquest. From the time of Henry IV. to Henry VIII. vegetables were little used, but in Harrison’s day the use of melons, pompions, radishes, cucumbers, cabbages, turnips, and the like was revived. They had beautiful flower-gardens annexed to the houses, wherein were grown also rare and medicinal herbs; it was a wonder to see how many strange herbs, plants, and fruits were daily brought from the Indies, America and the Canaries. Every rich man had great store of flowers, and in one garden might be seen from three hundred to four hundred medicinal herbs. Men extol the foreign herbs to the neglect of the native, and especially tobacco, “which is not found of so great efficacy as they write.” In the orchards were plums, apples, pears, walnuts, filberts; and in noblemen’s orchards store of strange fruit-apricots, almonds, peaches, figs, and even in some oranges, lemons, and capers. Grafters also were at work with their artificial mixtures, “dallying, as it were, with nature and her course, as if her whole trade were perfectly known unto them: of hard fruits they will make soft, of sour sweet, of sweet yet more delicate; bereaving also some of their kernels, others of their cores, and finally endowing them with the flavor of musk, amber, or sweet spices at their pleasure.” Gardeners turn annual into perpetual herbs, and such pains are they at that they even used dish-water for plants. The Gardens of Hesperides are surely not equal to these. Pliny tells of a rose that had sixty leaves on one bud, but in 1585 there was a rose in Antwerp that had one hundred and eighty leaves; and Harrison might have had a slip of it for ten pounds, but he thought it a “tickle hazard.” In his own little garden, of not above three hundred square feet, he had near three hundred samples, and not one of them of the common, or usually to be had.

Our kin beyond sea have always been stout eaters of solid food, and in Elizabeth’s time their tables were more plentifully laden than those of any other nation. Harrison scientifically accounts for their inordinate appetite. “The situation of our region,” he says, “lying near unto the north, does cause the heat of our stomachs to be of somewhat greater force; therefore our bodies do crave a little more ample nourishment than the inhabitants of the hotter regions are accustomed withal, whose digestive force is not altogether so vehement, because their internal heat is not so strong as ours, which is kept in by the coldness of the air, that from time to time (specially in winter) doth environ our bodies.” The north Britons in old times were accustomed often to great abstinence, and lived when in the woods on roots and herbs. They used sometimes a confection, “whereof so much as a bean would qualify their hunger above common expectation”; but when they had nothing to qualify it with, they crept into the marsh water up to their chins, and there remained a long time, “only to qualify the heat of their stomachs by violence.”

In Harrison’s day the abstemious Welsh had learned to eat like the English, and the Scotch exceeded the latter in “over much and distemperate gormandize.” The English eat all they can buy, there being no restraint of any meat for religion’s sake or for public order. The white meats–milk, butter, and cheese–though very dear, are reputed as good for inferior people, but the more wealthy feed upon the flesh of all sorts of cattle and all kinds of fish. The nobility (“whose cooks are for the most part musical-headed Frenchmen and strangers “) exceed in number of dishes and change of meat. Every day at dinner there is beef, mutton, veal, lamb, kid, pork, conie, capon, pig, or as many of these as the season yielded, besides deer and wildfowl, and fish, and sundry delicacies “wherein the sweet hand of the seafaring Portingale is not wanting.” The food was brought in commonly in silver vessels at tables of the degree of barons, bishops, and upwards, and referred first to the principal personage, from whom it passed to the lower end of the table, the guests not eating of all, but choosing what each liked; and nobody stuffed himself. The dishes were then sent to the servants, and the remains of the feast went to the poor, who lay waiting at the gates in great numbers.