The novelist Maggie O’Farrell will travel to Stratford-upon-Avon next weekend bearing two branches of rosemary cut from her own garden. A plant traditionally associated with remembrance, as Ophelia notes in Hamlet, its flowering sprigs will be laid on the ground as tributes to Shakespeare’s twin children, Judith and Hamnet.
For centuries, they have had no visible memorial in the town where they lived and died. But all that changes on Saturday morning when two rowan trees will be planted in the graveyard of Stratford’s Holy Trinity church to mark their very different lives. O’Farrell will then place her gift of rosemary at the foot of each tree.
