author
Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
1821–1916
A country clergyman with a lifelong passion for plants, he turned the vicarage garden at Bitton into the heart of his writing on botany, gardening, and Shakespeare’s flowers. His books have an easy authority that comes from years of hands-on growing and close observation.
1 Audiobook
The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare
by Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
About the author
Born at Bitton, Gloucestershire, in 1822, Henry Nicholson Ellacombe was educated at Bath Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford. He was ordained in 1847, served briefly as a curate in Sudbury, Derbyshire, and then returned to Bitton, where he succeeded his father as vicar in 1850.
Ellacombe is best remembered as both a clergyman and an enthusiastic plantsman. He spent decades cultivating the vicarage garden at Bitton and wrote widely on gardening and botany, including books such as The Plant-Lore & Garden-Craft of Shakespeare and In My Vicarage Garden and Elsewhere. His work is especially appealing for the way it blends practical knowledge, literary interest, and a genuine love of the natural world.
He later became rural dean of Bitton and an honorary canon of Bristol. Much of his life was closely tied to Bitton parish, its church, and its garden, which helped shape the calm, observant voice that runs through his writing.