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Intro Mary Garden
Medieval Countryside in a Garden
John S. Stokes Jr.
.
Woods Hole Garden of Our Lady, 1937
In 1933 landscape architect, Dorothea R. Harrison, of Boston
accepted a most unusual commission. Frances Crane Lillie of
Chicago and Woods Hole engaged her to design a 40 ft. x 40 ft.
"Garden of Our Lady" on the grounds of the stone Angelus Tower
donated to St. Joseph's Church in Woods Hole three years earlier.
It was Mrs. Lillie's desire to have a public garden of
pleasing proportion and color composed entirely of a wide
selection of flowers from the English countryside which had old
common names of pre-Reformation origin recalling Our Lady, the
Blessed Virgin Mary, and of other religious association.
These flowers were to be selected from an initial list of 61
flowers Mrs. Lillie had published a year before in a leaflet, "Our
Lady in Her Garden", when she made a planting of a few of these
flowers herself at the Angelus Tower, before a sculptured outdoor
figure of the Virgin executed by V. M. S. Hannell.
From her own planting, Mrs. Lillie quickly discovered that
many of the flowers on her list were unavailable through ordinary
horticultural sources, and that of those which were indeed
available many were difficult to cultivate, or had blooms which
were insignificant or of very short duration, under Cape Cod
growing conditions.
Miss Harrison's challenge was, thus, to design a garden which
was attractive and horticulturally feasible from a selection of
largely unfamiliar and difficult to procure plant materials. But
it was more that this. It was also to provide a setting in which
one or more of the plants of each species would have sufficient
accessibility and surrounding space so that they could be viewed
distinctly, with all the individuality desired by a botanist or
wild flower artist or photographer.
This was because a primary purpose of the Garden of Our Lady
was to enable the visitor to experience directly and immediately
the striking religious symbolism of the plant flowers and foliage,
evoked by their old names, with the help of a posted planting plan
and list, and plant markers, giving these names.
Mrs. Lillie wished the garden visitor to re-experience the
startling impact of the plant symbolism she had experienced a few
years before when shown the plants in British monastery gardens,
and especially when viewing the woodcut illustrations in The Mary
Calendar (Judith Smith, St. Dominic's Press, Ditchling, England,
1930), the source of most of the plants on her original list.
Thus, the symbolism of Our Lady's Cushion (Armeria maritima
foliage), Our Lady's Thimble (Campanula rotudifolia blooms),
Madonna's Pins (Geranium maculatum seed pods), Virgin Mary's
Candle (Verbascum thapsus bloom stalk) and Our Lady's Tears
(Tradescatia virginiana moist pendant spent blooms) and the other
plants was to be clearly apparent through easy access.
To assist Miss Harrison in her task, Mrs. Lillie enlisted the
aid of an academic friend, Winifred Jelliffe Emerson of Chicago,
to undertake an exhaustive research into old herbals, garden books
and plant dictionaries to discover as many Flowers of Our Lady as
possible from the popular religious traditions of the English
countryside. In this she accepted the authority of the Oxford
English Dictionary that the words "Lady", "Lady's and "Ladies" in
the older English plant names are almost invariably
foreshortenings of "Our Lady" and refer to the Blessed Virgin
Mary.
In the five years Miss Harrison worked on this project, this
and other research, including her own, uncovered several hundred
English Flowers of Our Lady, but a large number of them were
horticulturally unavailable, difficult or otherwise unsuitable
wildflowers.
Since flower gardening and the printing of gardening books in
England had their impetus largely after the Reformation - with its
prohibition of veneration of the Virgin Mary - very few of the
many newer, introduced, flowers now cultivated in English gardens
were given common names extending the pre-Reformation tradition of
associating flowers with the Virgin, as occurred in the unbroken
German and Spanish Catholic cultures, and newly in Latin America.
Accordingly, most of the old English Mary-names of flowers,
as we know them today, have come to us by way of the surviving
oral traditions of the countrysides, recorded through the research
of botanists and folklorists. Hence the paucity of familiar garden
subjects in the Lillie English research.
To meet the requirement of designing a Garden of Our Lady of
plants associated with Mary in pre-Reformation English rural and
monastic traditions, Miss Harrison decided to compose a garden
incorporating one or more clumps or groups, of four to six plants
each, of some 40 or 50 species or varieties, in over-all
proportionate arrangement, taking into consideration dispersed
continuity of bloom within a pleasing arrangement of foliage.
After deciding upon a cross-shaped central bed as a setting
for the focal Hannel sculpture, with an enclosing border of
matching contours, and a single entrance, she then introduced
unity into the otherwise diverse foliage and bloom pattern through
a dispersal of roses and lilies throughout the various clumps of
plants.
Roses and lilies had been traditionally planted in
Benedictine monastery gardens or Rosaries going back to St.
Benedict's own rose garden, and were associated with the Virgin
through the figurative titles applied to her by the Church fathers
of "Rose of Sharon", "Lily-of-the-Valley" and "Lily among the
Thorns" from the Song of Songs.
Within this general tradition, and with Mrs. Lillie's
concurrence, Miss Harrison considered it entirely appropriate, in
the over-all conception of the garden, to include a variety of
contemporary roses and lilies developed for fuller and longer
blooms.
The use of contemporary strains and hybrids also illustrated
the marvel, as Pope Pius XII later expressed it to a group of rose
growers assembled in Rome in 1955, that:
"Through the thousands of years of his history, man has
cultivated the vast garden of God, not only to maintain it,
but also to improve it. Yes, truly, God permitted man to
improve his work. Such is the admirable delicacy of our
heavenly Father, who calls his children to enter into such
intimate collaboration with him. Is this not also your
privilege, who unceasingly seek to create new varieties of
roses, with new shapes and colors?"
In addition to six rose and four lily varieties, Miss Harrison
incorporated twenty-six indigenous Flowers of Our Lady of the
pre-Reformation English countryside, or their close equivalents;
seven Mary-plants from other countries introduced in pre-Reformation
English monastery gardens; and also five plants introduced in
post-Reformation gardens, associated with Mary - to provide more
blue and white, her emblematic colors. The latter included
petunias; hosta (Assumption Lilies, from their bloom around the
Feast of the Assumption, August 15th); and Japanese iris (as
substitutes for indigenous shorter blooming English yellow flag
iris, symbol of Mary's sword of sorrow, and of her heavenly
queenship). She also substituted a New World marigold, Tagetes
erecta, for the indigenous English corn marigold, Chrysanthemum
segetum, or the introduced garden or pot marigold, Calendula
officinalis.
Petunias, also were seen in Germany as "Mary's Praises",
evidently from their up-facing flowers. Pansies, "Our Lady's
Delight" - also "Trinity Flower" from their three colors -
symbolized Mary's rejoicing in God, her Savior; marigolds,
"Marygolds", symbolized her heavenly glory; and cup or chalice-like
flowers, such as the lily and tulip, her reception of divine grace.
The scope of German flower symbolism of Our Lady came to be
more fully appreciated outside Germany through the publication in
1956 and 1957 of the index of Marzell's Deutsches Worterbuch Der
Pflanzennamen (Leipzig, 1937-1979).
Miss Harrison conceived of the planting of the center,
cross-shaped, bed as a flowery meade, with three varieties of thyme,
and teuchrium, prominent in the four arms of the cross - producing
dramatic color in May and June, and bloom continuity through the
summer.
Also, for color she used forget-me-not (Eyes of Mary) and
harebell (Our Lady's Thimble), which, like pansies, are
long-blooming in the Woods Hole seaside climate, if kept moist. A
bower in the rear border bore climbing morning glory (Our Lady's
Mantle) and clematis (Virgin's Bower).
In 1938, the year after Miss Harrison completed her work,
making revisions each year on the basis of plant growth and
blooming experience, the entire planting was destroyed by hurricane,
and subsequently only partially restored. After another hurricane,
in 1944, a second restoration was made, largely of petunias,
marigolds and alyssum, typical of summer gardens in the area, with
abandonment of the original plan and plant markers.
It wasn't until the Centennial of St. Joseph's Church in
1982, which was also the 50th Golden Jubilee of the Garden, that
the Garden of Our Lady was fully restored according to Miss
Harrison's final, 1937, "Plan #10" - thanks to the rediscovery of
the plan in the archives of the Woods Hole Historical Society by
Jane A. McLaughlin, Parish Historian, in the course of doing
research for a commemorative history she was writing for the
centennial.
Through an article, "Lillie Tower", by Rev. James J. Galvin,
C.SS.R. in l947, based on a 1942 visit to the garden, the writer
and Edward A. G. McTague undertook further research into the old
religious names of plants and founded the Mary's Gardens center in
Philadelphia, Pa. to assist in the planting of other Mary Gardens,
based on the inspiration of the Woods Hole Garden - with the
blessing of Mrs. Lillle. In 1952 we corresponded extensively with
Miss Harrison about the development of the garden, and in July of
that year we met at the garden with her, and also with Wilfrid L.
Wheeler distinguished horticulturalist and nurseryman, and Mrs.
Lillie's brother-in-law who had built the Angelus Tower and dug
the original garden beds, and who still oversaw the maintenance of
the Garden for Mrs. Lillie, who was then an invalid. Plans were
made at that time to restore the original garden planting by
stages, but this was set back by another hurricane in 1955.
After the death of Mrs. Lillie and of Mr. Wheeler, we
assisted, in 1961, in a partial restoration of the Garden
undertaken by Mrs. Lillie's cousin, Mrs. George Gigger, and Nelson
Cahoon, which was maintained by Mr. Cahoon up to the time of the
1982 full restoration.
At the present time basic soil maintenance, spring
cultivation, lawn cutting, hedge trimming and winter protection
are taken care of professionally, thanks to a tower and garden
maintenance trust fund established by Mrs. Lillie. Special plant
procurement and daily care are undertaken, in weekly rotation, by
members of the St. Joseph's Parish Mary Garden Society and other
volunteers.
The unusual variety of plant species, their proportioned
composition, and their daily maintenance give the garden a unique
quality which makes it immediately apparent to the visitor that
this is a special place of love. A supply of leaflets and article
reprints available to visitors in the attractive small room in the
base of the Angelus Tower beside which the garden is planted provide
a planting plan; lists of plants with their religious, common and
horticultural names; and historical background information.
Since Mary's Gardens was founded in Philadelphia in 1951,
numerous articles and news stories, together with literature
provided to garden visitors in Woods Hole, have resulted in over
30,000 inquiries about Mary Gardens from throughout the United
States and many other countries.
On invitation, Mrs. Bonnie Roberson of Hagerman, Idaho
displayed a miniature replica of her renowned Mary Garden at the
1962 annual meeting of The Herb Society of America in Washington,
D.C.. An exhibit Mary Garden designed by Mrs. Martha Ludes Garra
for the 1968 Philadelphia Flower Show received a special award of
merit.
In 1983 a large Mary Garden was planted at Our Lady's Shrine
in Knock, County Mayo, Ireland - perhaps the major Marian shrine
in the English speaking world, and visited by over one million
pilgrims annually. As a truly national Irish Mary Garden, it
gives a special place to over 30 plants bearing the old Gaelic
name for Mary, "Muire" - planted with other indigenous Irish
plants named for Mary in English through Anglo-Norman influence.
Two species of Flowers of Our Lady are being provided from
each of the 32 counties of Ireland, as found growing indigenously.
Also, a collection of thirty-eight "Plants of the Virgin
Mary" has been established in the Cloister Garden of Lincoln
Cathedral in England, "to make sure that the legends linking the
Mother of Christ with growing things are not forgotten and lost to
posterity." It is hoped that with this beginning, numerous Mary
Gardens will be established in England, wherein the British love
of flowers and gardening will devise beautiful plantings of full
complements of pre-Reformation Flowers of Our Lady, in fulfillment
of Mrs. Lillie's vision, so admirably first given substance by her
and Miss Harrison in Woods Hole in the 1930's.
Copyright, Mary's Gardens, 1984