Mention rosemary to anyone who loves literature, and they will respond immediately with Ophelia’s line: “Take rosemary, that’s for remembrance” (Hamlet IV.v.175). This emblematic association seems to have been a common one, for in “A Nosegaie alwaies sweet,” printed in 1584, Clement Robinson wrote, “Rosemarie is for remembrance, / betweene vs daie and night.” The association goes back beyond that if we can believe in the authenticity of a quotation attributed to Sir Thomas More and repeated in numerous books on gardening: “As for Rosemarine, I lett it run alle over my garden walls, not onlie because my bees love it, but because tis the herb sacred to remembrance and therefor to friendship; when a sprig of it hath a dumb language that maketh it the chosen emblem at our funeral wakes and in our burial grounds.” A century or so later John Parkinson observed that the “ciuill vses” of rosemary are, “as all doe know, at weddings, funerals, &c. to bestow among friends.”

In Thomas More’s time rosemary was a common garden plant in England, to judge by the remark attributed to him. Again Parkinson: “This common Rosemary is so well knowne through all our Land, being in euery womans garden, that it were sufficient but to name it as an ornament among other sweete herbes and flowers in our Garden, seeing euery one can describe it.” According to Foure bookes of husbandry, an import englished by Barnaby Googe and first printed in 1577, “it is sette by women for their pleasure, to growe in sundry proportions, as in the fashion of a Cart, a Pecock, or such like thing as they fancie.” A simpler account in Gerard’s Herball, printed in 1597, attests to its widespread cultivation: “they make hedges of it in the gardens of Italie and Englande, being a great ornament vnto the same.” Its abundance is well attested by the fact that sixteenth-century plague treatises advise burning it to clear the air of houses during onsets of the pestilence.

Rosemary was in fact an introduced plant, brought to England ca. 1440, though the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century herbalists who observe its commonness seem unaware of that. From the time of its introduction rosemary was seen as an addition to the pharmacopeia.