'Comforts Cordial' Garden
Creating a peaceful, sensory space to connect with the women's health past and present, in the gardens of Hall’s Croft
Comforts Cordial
The garden is designed to create a peaceful, sensory space to connect us with the past while allowing us to be present in moments of contemplation and calm. In memory of Susanna, whose epitaph reminds us she provided ‘comforts cordial’ to her community, the space is dedicated to menstrual and reproductive health and wellbeing.
Plants
The garden entirely consists of plants used in John Hall’s Casebook, and can also be found in women’s receipt books (handwritten books of recipes) for the treatment of menstrual and reproductive health. In this way, the garden connects us with a history of women’s healthcare as well as using modern ideas of sensory gardening that echo those of Susanna’s own time, such as planting pleasant smelling plants and positioning beehives or houses to bring the calming sound of bees as well as their pollinating uses to the garden.
Examples of the plants used in the garden:
Peony
Used by Hall for ‘Suffocation of the womb’, ‘uterine passion’ and ‘obstructed periods’
So possibly what we now recognize as period pain and pre-menstrual tension distress, irregular periods.
Rhubarb
‘obstructed periods’ – used by Hall (and probably Susanna too) to treat their daughter Elizabeth, who was having menstrual problems.
‘Melancholy with an affection of the womb’
‘constipation of the belly, melancholy, sleeplessness, disturbed dreams, obstructed menstruation.
Borage, Mugwort and Mallow
‘Frenzy after childbirth’
Perhaps we may view and post-natal mental health issues, such as post-natal depression or anxiety.
Clary Sage
Used by Hall for ‘Suffocation of the womb’ and ‘obstructed periods’
Now used herbally/anecdotally for soothing menstrual cramps.
Design and Sustainability
The garden encourages a non-linear experience, where you can weave in and out of the plants or sit comfortably among them. It is fully wheelchair accessible and next to a safe, flat and enclosed space where accompanying children can play.
The central, circular arch represents the cycles of women’s health and of nature and over time will gradually become covered in the climbing roses that have been planted at its base.
Plants are left to fulfil their life cycles, allowing dry stems and seedpods to attract birds and insects, as well as creating layers of sound that change with the seasons.
Our bee houses ensure we encourage pollinators to make the garden their home, while the plants are native and many self-seeding. They feature quotations from women writers of Susanna’s lifetime, whose work she may have read, including Mary Wroth and Amelia Lanyer.
The pots dotted through the garden were made locally by Whichford Pottery and feature tributes to Susanna in the form of extracts from her epitaph, her name and dates.
Who can use the garden?
While Hall’s Croft is closed to the public for vital conservation work, the garden is for the use of non-profit or voluntary organisations to bring their users and volunteers to benefit from the space. No one is charged for the use of the Comforts Cordial garden but pre-booking is required.
We are also hoping to run some public events using ‘Comforts Cordial’ so do sign up to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust mailing list to be kept up to date or check back to this webpage for details of any events that are coming up.
When conservation work is completed on the building, we will update details on increased access to the garden that this will happily bring!
If you know, work with or are part of a group who would like to know more about booking time in the garden, please contact [email protected].
Can’t physically get to the garden at the moment?
Please enjoy this peaceful, soundless video of the garden and if you would like to add to the experience with our Susanna Soundscape at the same time. Open the link to the Susanna Soundscape in a new tab and press play.
The team
The garden was conceived by Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson, a Literary Historian (University of Brighton), as part of the Susanna Hall project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Ailsa worked with Sian Cooper, horticulturalist, garden historian and Gardens Manager at Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, who expertly designed and realised the planting and construction of the space.
The garden is carefully maintained by Sian and the gardens team at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
The design of Comforts Cordial was an unusual design project! Projects don’t usually start by being given a list of plants to incorporate, and certainly not a list with so many plants which are usually viewed as “weeds”. I designed the space so that it would offer cozy refuges amongst the planting, where people would be able to leave the worries of the outside world behind and lose themselves in the sensory aspects of the space, whether that’s the colourful flowers, the scented herbs, the rustle of seed pods in the autumn, or simply watching the bees buzzing from plant to plant. I hope that this comes across to the site's users, and that it offers them a moment of peace and tranquillity.
— Sian Cooper, Gardens Manager
Project funded by AHRC (part of UKRI)
