At court, flowers coloured, scented, adorned, sustained, nourished, and enthralled. These interdisciplinary essays engage with flowers as real, artificial, and represented objects across the Tudor and Stuart courts in gardens, literature, painting, interior furnishing, garments, and as jewels, medicine, and food. Situating this burgeoning floral culture within a European floral revolution of science, natural history, global trade, and colonial expansion, they reveal the court’s distinctive floral identity and history. If the rose operated as a particularly English lingua franca of royal power across two dynasties, this volume sheds light on an array of wild and garden flowers to offer an immersive picture of how the Tudor and Stuart courts lived and functioned, styled and displayed themselves through flowers. It contributes to a revival of interest in the early modern green world and provides a focused view of a court and court culture that used and revelled in blooms.

Susannah Lyon-Whaley completed her doctoral thesis in Art History at the University of Auckland on Catherine of Braganza and the culture of nature. She has written articles on Stuart queens and the spa, and has further publications forthcoming on Catherine of Braganza and Mary of Modena.

Acknowledgements
Table of Illustrations
Introduction: Flowers and the Courts. - Susannah Lyon-Whaley.
Flowering Spaces
1. The ‘greater delight’: Gardens, Plants, and Flowers and the Tudor and Early Stuart Court. - Paula Henderson.
2. Canopied with Flowers: Adorning Court Spaces with Floral Tapestries and Hangings. - Eleri Lynn.
3. ‘I have them in my garden growing’: Henry Dingley’s Life with Flowers in Sixteenth-Century Worcestershire. - Maria Hayward.
Flowers and the Body
1. Flowers and Dress: Decorative, Dynastic, and Symbolic. - Susan North.
2. Blooming Fertility: Henrietta Maria and the Power of Plants as Iconography and Physic. - Erin Griffey.
3. A Taste for Flowers: Regenerating the Restoration Table. - Susannah Lyon-Whaley.
Performing Flowers
1. ‘Fairy Bowers’ and ‘Precious Flowers’ in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Elizabethan Court Culture. - Bonnie Lander Johnson.
2. Flowers and Gift Culture at the Elizabethan Court. - Susan M. Cogan.
3. Painted Flowers in Later Seventeenth-Century English Portraits. - Diana Dethloff.
Global Flowers
1. English Knots and French Parterres: English Floriculture in Continental Context. - Elizabeth Hyde.
2. The Orange and the Rose: Horticultural and Decorative Flowers at the English and Dutch Courts of William III and Mary II. - Amy Lim and Renske Ek.
3. Floral Culture in a New Imperial Era: Indian Textiles in English Courts and Commons c. 1560–1700. - Beverly Lemire.
Index