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Intro Mary Garden
Mary's Gardens Grow on the Internet
By Vincenzina Krymow The Cincinnati Catholic Telegraph
May 10, 1996
If you surf the Internet, you can also learn to sow - and create
a devotional garden dedicated to Our Lady by accessing the Mary's
Gardens home page on the World Wide Web.
Gardening instructions for new Mary gardeners, along with
suggested plans and little meditations for each plant, are
available on the page, established last October on the Feast of
Mary's Rosary and updated weekly by John Stokes of Philadelphia. A
convert to Catholicism, Stokes has been promoting Mary gardens
since he first learned of them in 1951. That year he and Edward
McTague, now deceased, founded Mary's Gardens as a "research,
educational and inspirational work to restore the cultivation of
medieval Flowers of Our Lady and Mary gardens in the present day."
They mailed out seeds and information about the flower legends,
helped people start gardens and wrote extensively about them.
Stokes, who has been corresponding with others about Mary gardens
since the 1950s, welcomes the technology which helps him further
the Mary's Gardens goals.
"The sense of reaching out to the whole wide world which comes
with the Internet is awesome," he said.
A Mary garden is a garden dedicated to Mary containing plants
either named after Mary or associated with her by legend. With a
statue of the Madonna as a focal point, it can contain such
familiar flowers as marigolds, called Mary's Gold because the gold
blossoms were said to have been used by Mary as coins; violets,
known as Our Lady's Modesty because they bow low; and Impatiens,
called Our Lady's Earrings because the rosette blooms on their
ring-like stems resemble earrings.
.
Marigolds are popular in Mary Gardens
Carnations, lilies, roses and herbs such as lavender and thyme
as well as the cuckoo flower, harebell and sea-pink or thrift, all
associated with Mary, might be included. The garden and its
flowers can serve as starting points for meditation on the life
and attributes of Mary.
Gardeners may choose from among the more than 1,000 plants,
including herbs and succulents, cataloged by Stokes and several
associates who continued the work of Winifred Jelliffe Emerson.
She researched plants named after Our Lady for the first U.S. Mary
Garden in Woods Hole on Cape Cod.
That garden, a gift of Frances Crane Lillie, was established in
1932 to complement a bell tower she had previously given to St.
Joseph Church in Woods Hole. After Mary's Gardens was
established, and information about plant symbolism and gardens
appeared in the many journals about Mary that thrived in the
1950s, numerous Mary gardens were created.
Two of these gardens still exist in the archdiocese. In
1954, Marianist Father Tom Stanley, who had read about the garden
at Woods Hole, developed a Mary garden at the grotto at Bergamo
Center in Dayton. Two years later it was considered one of the
world's largest.
Over the years many of the plants were replaced and the Mary
Garden concept was neglected, but some plants associated with Mary
remain. The goal is to maintain the grotto as a quiet meditative
spot now, said Marianist Brother Tom Pieper, who lives in the
building overlooking the grotto.
There are two types of gardens at the grotto, Brother Pieper
said. More formal gardens with colorful annuals are in front and
the wilder plantings, many of them associated with Mary, grow on the
rocky slopes.
In Glendale, near Cincinnati, at the Episcopal Convent of the
Transfiguration, avid gardener Miriam Evans designed a Mary garden
around an existing statue of the Madonna and Child in 1981. She
had heard about Mary Gardens and contacted Stokes for information.
Many of the original plantings remain and Evans and Episcopal
Sister of the Transfiguration Mary Veronica plan to "bring it back
to what it used to be."
Father Stanley and members of St. Catherine of Siena Parish in
Portage, Mich., where he is now pastor, established a Mary garden in
front of the church in 1993. A nationally renowned Mary garden is
the one at St. Mary's Church, Annapolis, Md. adjacent to historic
Carroll House, dedicated in 1991.
Stokes' concern has been the continued dissemination of
information. Now with the broad reach of the internet, his task
is easier.
People access the Mary's Gardens internet site from all over the
world - Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, as well as all the
European countries and Latin America, he said. In one day 1,000
people accessed the "Spotless Lily" flower clip accompanying the
text, "Plant Symbols of Our Lady from the Church Fathers and the
Litury." The clip is from a photo of the first Madonna Lily he
cultivated, in 1952.
"We keep putting up new photos and texts each month, so that
people keep coming back and back," he said. Some people have
spent up to four hours downloading the entire file on the World
Wide Web site.
The home page gave him the "ability to re-activate all the
articles" written by him and others about Mary gardens during a
44-year period. Since October, he has been single-handedly
scanning them onto the web site.
Visitors to the home page will find articles on the medieval
flowers of Our Lady, church nature symbols of Mary, medieval Mary
gardens, flower theology, indoor dish Mary gardens, sources for
seeds, bulbs and plants, as well as miniature flower photos, a
poem, "Gardens Give Mary Glory," a Mary Garden Prayer invoking the
gardening saints, and descriptions of representative Mary gardens.
Stokes' dream is expressed in the press release announcing the
opening of the home page: "The universal reach of the (Internet)
will also facilitate the restoration of Mary Gardens in the many
cultures, in addition to English and Spanish speaking, from which
the research has found many of the symbolical Flowers of Our Lady
to have been current in medieval times."
The home page address is http://www.mgardens.org. The email
address is marysgardens@mgardens.org.
Reprinted with permission of The Catholic Telegraph and of the
author.