CYPRESS

22nd January 2024

QUOTATION

A plague upon them

…

Poison be their drink!

Gall, worse than gall, the daintiest that they taste;

Their sweetest shade, a grove of cypress trees;

Their chiefest prospect, murd’ring basilisks;

SUFFOLK: Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 2

CYPRESS (Cupressus sempervirens)

Cypress has several associations in Shakespeare’s works. There is association with death in the quotation above and in Twelfth Night, it was also used as a sweetly scented wood for chests and other furniture. Cypress can also indicate a fine linen and it used in this context in a Winter’s Tale.

Cypress has a long connection with death and funeral rites, and is often planted in cemeteries. Cypresses appear in numerous ancient Greek sources including Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides’ description of Athenian funerals with Cypress coffins. Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes the transformation of one of Apollo’s lovers, Cyparissus, into the Cypress. Pliny tells us that it is sacred to Pluto, the god of the underworld.

John Gerard (1597) describes how Cypresses ‘hath been planted, as at Sion a place neere London, sometimes a house of Nunnes; it groweth also at Greenwich, and at other places, and likewise at Hampstead in the garden of Mr. Wade, one of the Clerkes of her majesties privie counsell.’ He also includes some of the medicinal qualities of the Cypress and that ‘shavings of the wood laid among garments preserve them from moths’.

Cypress is an evergreen conifer native to the Eastern Mediterranean up to Iran but it is grown in many countries. The tree can grown in a tall cone shape or also with spreading branches.

More Information

John Gerard, 1597, The Herball or Generall Historie of Plants (1636 edition accessed via Archive.org)

Kew Plants of the World Online: Cupressus sempervirens

Perseus Digital Library: Cypress