Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

The history of the English Garden reveals more than expected about the past and its people.

This series explores the theme of gardens as places of work, rest and leisure.

In this episode, historian Dr. Vivian Thomas gives a potted history of Shakespeare's use of plants and gardens in his plays.

Thank you. Well, my ideal time for talking is about two and a half hours.

So this is going to be torture, no more than a sketch.

You've got a little handout.

That book on Shakespeare's Plants and Gardens came out just last month.

And to give you an indication of the range of Shakespeare,

there are about now 15 volumes, each one devoted to one aspect of Shakespeare's language.

It's a big one on Shakespeare's legal language.

Because I was an economist before I came to literature,

I wrote the one on Shakespeare's political and economic language.

It is astonishing the range of this man.

But tonight we're going to restrict ourselves just to a little fragment

of what I would like to do, but certainly all 200

plants and more encompassed in Shakespeare's works are present in that dictionary, and one

of the things we do is define the plant and give you an indication about its advent and so on in the first section, then give examples

of Shakespeare's use of the plant in this middle section, and then there's a little bibliographer

...