Go to Home Page
Intro Mary Garden
Seeds of Devotion
.
Heaven and earth meet in the peace and beauty of the Mary Garden
behind St. Mary's Catholic Church in Annapolis.
Women in the Mary Garden feed a flowering of the spirit
By Susan Reimer, Sun Staff Correspondent
The Baltimore Sun, Sunday May 14, 1995
The women of the Mary Garden at St. Mary's Catholic Church
in Annapolis often arrive in early evening, when the sun has
cooled and the chores of their secular lives are finished. But
they don't come to meditate among the flowers.
They come to work.
Bending their tired backs to weed or plant, they hear hymns
drift out from the stained-glass windows of St. Mary's Church as
the choir rehearses. Sailboats whisper in and out of Spa Creek.
Birds gather for an evening bath in the fountain that burbles at
the sandaled, granite feet of Mary and Jesus.
"And you really feel that this must be what heaven is like,"
says Laura Van Geffen. "If it is heaven," she adds, "the Saints
and angels are laughing at me."
"I feel as if I've been tricked," she says as she wipes her
sweaty forehead with the back of a garden-gloved hand. "I'm
Catholic, but I never understood the veneration of Mary. I used
to pray, 'I don't get it. Show me how to love your mother.'
"Then this fell in my lap". Mrs. Van Geffen drives a spade
into the soft, spring earth where another rosebush will be
planted.
"I would have preferred a revelation to years of backbreaking
work."
Somewhere between the muddy reality of tilled soil and the
chaste beauty of the woman for whom the flowers are named, there
lies the Mary Garden.
The flrst public garden dedicated to the Virgin seems to have
been the Garden of Our Lady at St. Joseph's Church in Woods Hole,
Massachusetts, in 1932.
John S. Stokes Jr., who, with Edward A. G. McTague, in 1951
began a spare-time project called Mary's Gardens in Philadelphia,
remains the official arbiter and historian. He says the Mary
Garden at St. Mary's is the largest one in a parish, and praises
it for its beauty and its spirituai roots.
The garden is tucked behind St. Mary's Church, hardly known
beyond the high walls of the 300-year-old church and rectory that
protect it. The breezes of nearby Spa Creek rustle it softly,
like a prayer. Even parishioners who pass through it on their way
to the parking lot after Mass are not all aware of its symbolism.
For the handful of women of St Mary's who tend it, this patch
of earth represents something between God and gardening. It is a
spiritual Journey that needs to be watered and weeded. It is a
meditation on Christ's mother that requires 70 bags of mulch twice
a year.
"There is a tranquility here that keeps coming back in the
middle of our crazy lives," says Kahla Lehman. The hedge trimmer
she grips with two hands flies like a sword which is a sharp
contrast to her words. "We all have weeds at home, you know."
The Mary Garden began as a seed in the determined mind of Nan
Sears, a St. Mary's parishioner who, at 76, is not much taller
than the hollyhock spikes she tends. (In the Mary Garden, they
are called St. Joseph's staff.) She had been waiting since 1945,
when a garden club lecturer first told her of Mary Gardens, to
create such a church garden.
"Having grown up with a family who loved the woods and the
wilds, it is part of me," says Mrs. Sears. "I don't ever walk
through a garden that I haven't thought of her. I feel she is
there, a part of everything beautiful in the outdoors. I wanted a
Mary Garden as a tribute to her and to be closer to her.
In 1989, the pastor of St. Mary's, the Rev. John Murray, gave
Mrs. Sears his blessing to turn a patch of weeds and gum wrappers
behind the church into such a tribute. "Just don't ask me for any
money," he said cheerfully.
Tony Dove, curator of the gardens at London Towne Publik
House in Edgewater, and Mrs. Van Geffen, a heavy-duty volunteer
who, at 50, has the freedom to garden that only older children can
give you, joined Mrs. Sears in designing the garden.
Tons of topsoil were moved in, and a statue was commissioned.
All of this was done before Mrs. Sears and Mrs. Van Geffen, at
cocktail parties and in church, had collected the $35,000 to pay
for It. "I've had to believe that she wanted it there," says Mrs.
Sears.
In 1991, Father Murray dressed in his finest vestments and
sprinkled the garden with holy water. It was Sept. 8, the feast
of Mary's birth, the traditional day for blessing the harvest and
the seeds for the coming spring.
Today, the Mary Garden is full and mature. Colors move
through it in waves as the seasons change. It is a backdrop for
photos of brides and first Holy Communion children. Factory
workers eat lunch there. St. Mary's schoolchildren plant
Mother's Day flowers there. And mourners weep there.
"One time, it is just a pretty place. Another time, it hits
you hard because of something that is going on in your life," says
Mrs. Sears.
"It is a thinking place," says Mrs. Lehmann, a 40-year-old
stay-at-home mom from Annapolls. "I have been working here when
people come to sit. And you can feel their hearts breaking."
A statue at the center
.
At the center of
the garden is the granite
statue of Mary and Jesus.
He looks to be about 9 or
10, and he gazes up at her
with the kind of love in
his face that only a
mother ever sees.
Created by sculptor
Leo Irrera, it recalls the
Holy Family's peaceful
time in Nazareth, when
Mary might have had a
garden of her own.
Around the statue
and fountain are the
flowers that carry Mary's
name or praise her
attributes, or recall some
Mary of Nazareth
household possession. You'd recognize them all. None is rare.
But you know them by other names, not the names given them by
priests, poets and storytellers in the Middle Ages. The Mary
names were erased during the Reformation when devotion to the
Virgin went out of fashion.
Forget-me-nots are the eyes of Mary: a bleeding heart is
Mary's heart; sedum recalls Our Lady's hair; fuchsia, Our Lady's
eardrops; lavender is known as flight to Egypt; the thrift is Our
Lady's pincushion; gladiolus was her ladder to heaven; the iris,
Mary's sword of sorrow.
Church fathers first referred to Mary as "the rose of Sharon"
and "the lily of the valley" from references in the Old Testament
that they believed foretold the virgin mother of the savior of the
world. But early Christians found reminders of Mary in every
flower that bloomed. The rose was an emblem of her love of God.
The lily represented her purity, the myrtle her virginity, the
violet her humility and the marigold her heavenly glory.
In other flowers, there was seen some resemblance to her
hair, her fingers, her hands. Still others called to mind her
mantle, her smock, her slippers. Others, her needles, her thread,
her thimble. It seemed everything she touched was remembered in a
flower.
Elaborate legends grew around her flowers. Manger plants -
holy hay, cradlewort, Our Lady's bedstraw - were supposed to have
bloomed when the newborn Jesus was laid on them. The white
markings on Our Lady's thistle first appeared when her milk
dropped on them as she nursed the infant. Rosemary's clean
fragrance is said to have come from the days when Mary hung her
wash on its bushes to dry.
Not all are cheerful. Our Lady's tears appeared when she
wept at the foot of the cross; Our Lady's hair, when she rended
her tresses in grief.
For the people of the countryside, who could not read or had
no books of theology, flowers recorded the story of Mary's life.
Religious nature
For the women of St. Mary's, this is more than a
horticultural hobby. Mr. Stokes has written them, urging the
restoration of the prayerful dignity of gardening, the returm to
the understanding that nature is the link between God and man.
"True happiness does not come from hundreds of blossoms,
gigantic blooms or riotous color," Mr. Stokes writes. "Neither
does it come from scratching the earth and throwing in a few
seeds. Rather, it comes from the devoted tending of the good and
faithful steward, who realizes his or her dependence on God's
providence and who sees in its fruits God's artistry."
Mrs. Van Geffen and Mrs. Lehmann, attracted to the Mary
Garden project by the spunk of Mrs. Sears, are not so ephemeral as
they fill garbage bags with weeds and unload flats of marigolds,
known in the garden as Mary's Gold. They are the strong backs
here. But there is God in their gardening. And they believe God
is in this garden.
"We have our own little ecosystem going here," says Mrs. Van
Geffen, who has her own garden a short walk from St. Mary's. "The
walls, the sun, the Holy Spirit. Everything grows here, even the
weeds."
"We all have places we have to be," says Mrs. Lehmann. She
often brings her energetic kids with her as she works, and finds
the garden calms 9-year-old Lindsay and 7-year-old Jamie as surely
as a lullaby might.
"But you just have to have this mental image of how it will
feel here. Then you just get yourself here, and God takes over."
Reprinted with permission of The Baltimore Sun,
article by Susan Reimer, photographs by Amy Davis.