As Caroline Spurgeon observed nearly a century ago, Shakespeare’s early histories are filled with botanical imagery, the growth and decay of plants being “the most constant running metaphor and picture in Shakespeare’s mind in the early historical plays as a whole.” More recently, Jean Feerick has returned to this terrain, drawing attention to the way that many Elizabethan plays associate English soil with the flesh of noble bodies, often depicted vegetally as they are rhetorically uprooted, plucked, pruned, and weeded. Not yet having received sustained attention for its elaborate botanical imaginings, however, is the third play of Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy, 3 Henry VI. Like the other plays in the tetralogy, 3 Henry VI dramatically portrays the years-long affair of the so-called Wars of the Roses, the third part focusing on the shifting tides of power between the houses of York (emblem: white rose) and Lancaster (emblem: red rose). The Yorkists are led by the Duke of York (Richard Plantagenet) and his sons, including Richard, Duke of Gloucester (who will become King Richard III). The house of Lancaster is ostensibly led by King Henry VI, though in practice it is Queen Margaret who commands the Lancastrian army. In addition to featuring characters physically wearing white and red roses, the play makes numerous botanical references. From the elaborate conceit of a throne-impeding “thorny wood” in Gloucester’s famous soliloquy, to the slain Duke of York being compared to a fallen oak tree, 3 Henry VI deploys such images cannily and consistently.