ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the gardener must have knowledge of husbandry and the willingness to labor diligently to produce a "most commodiouse and delectable garden". In such a world in which farmers, gardeners, herbalists, and land reformers aspire to ideological control of horticulture, the weed becomes an outlaw, a plant that directly opposes human mastery over nature. Apothecaries, doctors, gardeners, and plantsmen became increasingly interested in understanding, cataloguing, and cultivating the new varieties of plants along with their domestic counterparts. England looked to the Tudor rule of the past as paradisical compared with the troublesome present and the uncertain future. England itself seemed like an untended garden, gone to ruin, waiting with trepidation with the change to a new monarch. Impediments to horticulture in the physical world, weeds also often morph into symbolic antitheses to culture writ large in that early modern writers apply weeds as metaphors to describe obstructions to the well-groomed garden of civilization.
