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                                               Intro Mary Garden
Mary Gardens

The Herbs and Flowers Of The Virgin Mary


Bonnie Roberson and John Stokes, Jr.          The Herbarist, 1982


     Mary Gardens, gardens planted with herbs and flowers that
through the ages have been associated with the Virgin Mary, can be
said to have roots that go back to times before Christ.  Even then,
herbs, especially their blossoms, served as symbols of everything
that was pure and holy, as found in Christ and his Virgin Mother.

     Legends regarding many of these flowers abound in Christian
folklore.  For instance, it is related that Ornithogalum arabicum,
Star-of-Bethlehem, first appeared on this earth on the night of
Christ's birth.  According to the legend, the star that led the
three wise men to Bethlehem burst into thousands of fragments
after it had stopped at its destination.  These bright fragments
which fell to the ground were transformed into flowers, indicating
to the Magi the holiness of the area.  Another legend relates that
Helleborus niger, the Christmas rose, miraculously appeared when
an angel's wings swept the ground in order to provide a gift for a
poor girl who was weeping because she had no gift to place beside
those brought by the shepherds to the manger at Bethlehem.

     In the "nature symbolism" of the Church, certain plants, such
as wheat, grapes, thorny plants, and cross-shaped flowers, which
recalled the Last Supper, the Crowning of Thorns, the Crucifixion,
and the Mystical Body, referred directly to Christ.  However,
herbs and flowers were generally referred to Christ through his
Mother, and thus Mary, typified as the Mystical Bride of Christ by
the Church Fathers, was given the titles of Mystical Rose, Rose of
Sharon, Lily-of-the-Valley, and Garden Enclosed.

     Medieval Christians, in their search for the most exact
likeness of Mary, realized that of all God's creations none could
excel flowers in representing the beauty of her holiness, the
splendor of her heavenly glory and the immaculateness of her
purity. Likewise, fragrant herbs and flowers were unsurpassed in
recalling her spiritual sweetness: soothing and healing herbs, her
heavenly mercy and succor; and bitter and sour herbs, her bitter
sorrows.

     The Venerable Bede (673-735), Benedictine monk, historian,
and scholar, wrote of the white lily as the emblem of the Blessed
Virgin; the white petals symbolized the purity of her body and the
golden anthers the beauty of her soul.  Later, St. Bernard praised
the Virgin Mary as "the violet of humility, the lily of chastity,
the rose of charity, the Balm of Gilead, and the golden
gillyflower of heaven."

     With time, more and more herbs and flowers, associated with
Mary in various ways, took on emblematic significance and were
adopted as signifying specific virtues.  Among these, some of the
most important were the rose (Rosa canina), which was adopted as
the emblem of Mary's love of God; the white lily (Lilium candidum,
Madonna lily), her purity; the myrtle (Myrtus communis), her
virginity; and the marigold (Calendula officinalis), her heavenly
glory.

     Christians, who saw these herbs and flowers as special signs
of heaven and the unfolding of spiritual life, gathered them for
the church, and eventually started placing them on the altars. For
special occasions they were strewn throughout the church and woven
into garlands and crowns which were worn by the priests.

     As their importance intensified, these symbolic flowers and
herbs were collected and tended in the sacristan's gardens,
gardens planted near the church for purposes of providing cut
flowers and herbs for the altar and for church processions.

     Later, little specialty gardens devoted solely to the
cultivation of the symbolic plants associated with Mary,
frequently planted around statuary figures of the Virgin Mary or
Virgin with Child, were created. These specialty gardens, called
St. Mary's Gardens, or Mary Gardens, enabled people to honor the
Virgin Mary and her Son directly in the garden, as well as through
the use of the cut flowers inside the church.

     It is not known exactly where or when a Mary Garden was first
planted. However, it is known that St. Fiacre (600-670), Patron
Saint of Gardeners, devoted his life to tending a garden
surrounding an oratory and hospice which he built and dedicated to
Mary, and perhaps it was his garden which served as a model and
inspiration for such gardens.

     Unquestionably, many such gardens existed in medieval times,
but because all evidence of a garden is lost in a comparatively
short time once it is not tended, there is now no means of
supportive evidence.  Unfortunately, few wrote books on gardening
and/or gardens during that time and those that were written and/or
illustrated relied mostly on past classical works, with the result
that these manuscripts and books do not reflect the actual plants
or gardens of their time.  Likewise, the Mary Gardens depicted in
religious art of that period appear to be ideally conceived rather
than based on actual gardens.  The St. Mary's Garden mentioned in
the accounting records of Norwich Priory, England, is now
believed, after thorough research, to have been a traditional
monastic rose garden, and the reputed Mary Garden of Melrose
Abbey, Scotland, now appears to have been nothing more than the
mention in an historical document that the abbot and some of the
monks there had private gardens.  It is of course possible that
these private gardens were Mary Gardens, but there is no specific
proof of this.

     Literature pertaining to the period of the discovery of the
New World, shows that the early explorers and settlers not only
very early brought plants that were symbolically related to the
Virgin Mary, but that they also very quickly associated native
wild plants with symbolic names.  Among the latter are: two
terrestrial orchids, Lady's Slipper (Cypripedium spp.) and Lady's
Tresses (Spiranthes spp ); Madonna's Pins (Geranium maculatum,
wild geranium); Lady's Smock (Cardamine pratensis, meadow cress);
Our Lady's Mantle (Ipomoea spp., morning glory); and Our Lady's
Lockets (Polygonatum spp., Solomon's seal).

     Although flower symbolism in the New World has existed from
the days of its discovery and colonization, there is, ironically,
no real evidence of a Mary Garden anywhere in the Americas until
quite recent times.

     It is interesting that in 1932, while seven Boston ladies
were busy studying botany at Harvard and thinking of founding a
society to further the knowledge of herbs, another lady in nearby
Woods Hole, Cape Cod, was busy researching a special category of
herbs and plants, those with old religious names that symbolized
the Virgin Mary, a selection of which she planted in a very
special garden, and dedicated to the Virgin Mary, that very same
year.  Thus was founded the first public Mary Garden in America.

           .

     This garden, founded in 1932 by Mrs. Frances Crane Lillie of
Chicago, and a summer resident of Woods Hole where her husband
Dr. Frank R. Lillie was President and Director of the Marine
Biological Laboratory, is today, after being destroyed twice by
hurricanes, restored to its original planting plan.  The
restoration was prompted by the rediscovery of the garden's
historical uniqueness and significance by the parishioners in the
course of the research undertaken for the writing of a
commemorative history for the centennial of St. Joseph's Parish.

     It was Mrs. Lillie's recollection of the symbolic herbs and
flowers that she had encountered in England that prompted her to
conceive and donate a Mary Garden to St. Joseph's Church.  She
felt it was an appropriate complement to the Angelus Tower, which
she had donated to the Church several years earlier, and she
clearly conceived both the Angelus Tower and Mary Garden as a
religious statement and summons to the scientists and students at
the Marine Biological Laboratory, directly across from St.
Joseph's Church.  Daily, the chimes of the two bells in the Tower,
which are inscribed with the names "Mendel" and "Pasteur", in
honor of two pioneers of genetics and bacteriology, testify to
this concept.

     In planning the Mary Garden, which Mrs. Lillie named "Garden
of Our Lady", she enlisted the help of an academic friend,
Winifred Emerson of Chicago, to undertake an extensive research of
all the old religious names of herbs and flowers as recorded in
English botanical, folklore and linguistic studies.  From this
list she chose and planted in the garden, which had been laid out
by Wilfred Wheeler, distinguished horticulturist and first
Agricultural Commissioner of Massachusetts, sixty-one specimens
which she felt were most symbolically significant.  After the
first year, it became obvious that some of the English species did
not lend themselves to cultivation at Woods Hole, so she engaged
in 1933 the services of a landscape architect, Dorothea K.
Harrison of Boston, to make a horticulturally more appropriate
selection.  After many revisions, 48 specimens from a list, which
by then numbered 500, were planted around a commissioned statue of
the Virgin Mary, in a cross-shaped bed.

     The Mary Garden at Woods Hole can truly be considered to be a
mother garden.  It has not only inspired many visitors into
planning their own little Mary Gardens, but was also the
inspiration and mother garden for the world-wide Mary's Gardens,
founded in Philadelphia in 1951 by Edward A. G. McTague and John
S. Stokes, Jr., as a non-profit organization which seeks to revive
the medieval practice of cultivating gardens of herbs and flowers
which have Marian names.

     Research by this foundation and others in the past 30 years
into the folklore, flora, art, and gardens of Medieval and
Renaissance England, Ireland, France, Germany, the Low Countries,
Italy, Spain, and Latin America has produced a list of over 1000
herb, flower, shrub, and tree names that are symbolic of Mary.  It
is interesting that many of these symbolic names were first found
mentioned in the works of Renaissance botanists and illustrators
who learned of the common or symbolic folk names of these plants
from the ordinary people whom they encountered in their work in
the field.  Common names of regional flora that had been used by
the common folk for hundreds of years were thus historically
recorded.  Although this extensive list, still under compilation,
is not yet available to the general public, Mariana 1, a botanical
listing of over 600 plants given symbolic names referring to God,
the Virgin Mary, the angels, and the saints in popular Christian
tradition, is available, at no cost, to those interested.

     A small Mary Garden, as part of any garden, herb or
otherwise, would certainly enrich not only the garden and
gardener, but visitors to the garden as well.  All herbs and
flowers evoke a certain fascination in all who pass by, but herbs
and flowers which have special symbolic associations with the
Virgin Mary add that extra touch of wonder that reminds us all of
the Creator, and which can make the garden truly a "paradisi" or
"garden of paradise".


Reprinted by permission of The Herbarist