Green Bushes
Green Bushes is a traditional English folk song (Roud 1040, Laws P2) that has influenced several well-known classical arrangements. It appears in Vaughan Williams’s English Folk Song Suite (second movement), Percy Grainger’s Green Bushes (Passacaglia on an English Folksong), and George Butterworth’s The Banks of Green Willow. The tune is very similar to the Lost Lady Found movement in Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy and to the tune Cutty Wren.
The song was extremely popular in England, where it was printed on broadside sheets from the 1820s or 1830s and sold widely by nineteenth-century printers. Its fame grew even more after the popular melodrama The Green Bushes, or A Hundred Years Ago by John Baldwin Buckstone (1845), in which the heroine references the song and sings verses, helping to boost sheet music sales.
One of the early recordings is a 1907 performance by Joseph Taylor, recorded on wax cylinder by the musicologist Percy Grainger. The British Library later digitised it and made it available online in 2018.
Story in simple terms: A speaker walking in spring hears a sweet young woman by the Green Bushes. They talk about love and marriage. He offers her rich clothes if she stays loyal to him, but she says she won’t marry for clothes. She invites him to come with her beneath the trees, claiming her true love is coming. When he arrives, he finds she has gone off with another man, and he laments farewell to Green Bushes.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 19:29 (CET).