Hesperides (4 syl.). Three sisters who guarded the golden apples which Hera (Juno) received as a marriage gift. They were assisted by the dragon Ladon. Many English poets call the place where these golden apples grew the "garden of the Hesperides." Shakespeare (Love's Labour's Lost, iv. 3) speaks of climbing trees in the Hesperides." (See Comus, lines 402-406.)

"Show thee the tree, leafed with refinëd gold,
Whereon the fearful dragon held his seat.
That watched the garden called Hesperides."
Robert Grene: Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. (1508.)

From Brewer's Dictionary of Fact and Fable

Painting: Frederic Lord Leighton The Garden of the Hesperides

The Hesperides are a westernised version of familiar goddess myths. The apple tree is the goddess' tree of wisdom, and eating them conferred immortality. Leighton correctly identifies the dragon as a form of the python, and the pool with egrets is also appropriate symbolism. Note also that Hesperus was one of the names of the Evening Star (along with Phosphorous and Lucifer) , the planet Venus, so the ancient Greeks would have understood when told that Hercules went to the Garden of the Hesperides to fetch an apple of immortality, that he went to the place in the west where the goddess rested of an evening.