In the seventeenth century, even the most elaborate and fashionable gardens had areas set aside for growing herbs, fruit, vegetables and flowers for domestic use, while those of more modest establishments were vital to the survival of the household....

When Falstaff calls upon the sky to rain potatoes in "The Merry Wives of Windsor", he is highlighting the late sixteenth-century belief that the exotic vegetable, recently introduced to England from the Americas, was an aphrodisiac. In "Romeo and Jul...

The list of favorite flowers has remained remarkably constant over the centuries. From late-sixteenth, early seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish flower-pieces we can see what were considered desirable at that time: the rose, iris, carnation and lil...