The Medieval Garden Enclosed

Left: Medlar in fruit below the west wall of Bonnefont Cloister Garden; right: a medlar tree in a detail from the tapestry The Unicorn is Found. Learn more about the Unicorn tapestries.

Well into November, long after other autumnal fruits have fallen to the ground, the small greenish-brown fruits of the medlar tree (Mespilus germanica) cling to its crooked boughs.??The fruit??is not harvested until the leaves fall,??when the??medlars can be easily plucked, although they are still too hard and??acerbic to be eaten out of hand.??Experts differ as to whether exposure to a few degrees of frost, which does the fruit no harm,??is??important to the long ripening process to come.??Once gathered, the fruits are placed stem-side down??in straw and??stored in a cool, dark place for several weeks until they are rotten-ripe and the pulp has turned into a delicious mush???a process known as bletting.??(Lee Reich, Uncommon Fruits Worthy of Attention, 1992).?? Read more »

Above, left to right: Woody nightshade in fruit and flower; Mandrake in fruit; Henbane flower.

Among the plants??associated with witchcraft in antiquity and the Middle Ages??are a number of??poisonous and narcotic??species that are chemically related to one another, including the mandrakes (Mandragora officinarum and M. autumnalis), henbane, (Hyoscyamus niger), thorn apple (Datura metel) and deadly nightshade (Atropa belladonna).??All are members of??the nightshade family, the Solanaceae. Read more »

Above: Ripe quinces in late October.

The famous quince trees that grace the four beds at the center of the Bonnefont Cloister Herb Garden have grown there since the early 1950s. Although the trees are showing their age, they still bear a heavy crop???so heavy that it is necessary to thin the fruits in late summer and to prop up the aging boughs to help them to bear the weight of the fruit. The quinces are not harvested; the fruits are picked up as they fall. Read more »

Above: Stems and leaves of Ricinus communis

Widely naturalized throughout the tropics, castor bean (Ricinus communis) is??commonly grown as an ornamental annual in??American and European gardens, but it is also??a??crop plant of worldwide economic importance.??In a tropical environment, the castor bean attains the status of a thirty-foot tree. Even in temperate zones, it can reach a height of fifteen feet in a single season. An ancient medicinal plant of African origin,??castor bean??was employed by the Egyptians as a cathartic and is among the plant remedies??found??in the Ebers Papyrus. ??Like other members of the??Spurge family (Euphorbiaceae), the plant is poisonous. Dioscorides, writing in the first century, refers to the??plant??by its Egyptian name, kiki, as well as its Greek and Roman names: kroton and ricinus.?? The last two names derive from the Greek and Latin words for “tick,”?? because of a fancied resemblance of the??seed to the parasite. Read more »

Above, from left to right: Red bryony vine in fruit in October; Red bryony vine blooming in June; a lusterware albarello or pharmacy jar patterned with stylized bryony vines

The luxuriant foliage of the bryony vine begins to yellow and fall in September. By October all that is left are the small red berries that hang from a lacy network of slender brown stems.????Although the??vine dies back to the ground in early autumn, the??root is perennial and will send up new shoots in the spring.??Bryonia dioica is graceful even in decline; next??May the vine will quickly veil??a willow trellis in Bonnefont Garden with bright green leaves and show itself to be one of the prettiest plants in the collection. Read more »

Above, from left to right: Fennel flourishing in Bonnefont Cloister Garden in July; green fennel fruits ripening in late summer; umbels of dry fennel fruits at the end of the season.

Let us not forget to honor fennel. It grows
On a strong stem and spreads its branches wide.
Its taste is sweet enough, sweet too its smell;
They say it is good for eyes whose sight is clouded,
That its seed, taken with milk from a pregnant goat,
Eases a swollen stomach and quickly loosens
Sluggish bowels.?? What is more, your rasping cough
Will go if you take fennel-root mixed with wine.

???From Hortulus by Walahfrid Strabo. Translated from the Latin by Raef Payne. The Hunt Botanical Library, 1966.

The ninth-century Benedictine abbot Walahfrid Strabo was a gardener as well as a scholar and a poet.?? He praises??the stately and beautiful fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) growing in his monastery garden??for its medicinal virtues, but fennel was also an ancient culinary herb, enjoyed both as a seasoning and a vegetable.

Indigenous to the Mediterranean, fennel was brought to England and Germany by the Romans, and to India and China by Arab traders.?? The Roman natural historian Pliny, writing in the first century, cites fennel in more than twenty remedies.?? All parts of the plant???roots, shoots,??leaves, and seeds???have been used both as food and as medicine. Read more »

Left: Angels offer a basket of jasmine and roses to the??Madonna and Child; right: detail of a basket of jasmine flowers and single-petaled white roses.

Jasmine’s significance as a symbolic flower blossoms in the art of the Italian Renaissance, where it appears as a symbol of divine love and heavenly happiness.?? In combination with roses and lilies, which have a much longer iconographic history in Western art, it often appears in representations of the Madonna and Child.?? Attendant angels offer jasmine to the infant Christ, or are wreathed with crowns of jasmine themselves. (Mirella D’Ancona Levi, The Garden of the Renaissance:?? Botanical Symbolism in Italian Painting, 1977.)

Although it was grown in the Islamic gardens of southern Europe as early as the twelfth century, jasmine was not established in northern European gardens until the close of the Middle Ages.?? Jasmine and roses scented the garden walks of the mid-fourteenth-century villa (believed to be the Villa Palmieri, two miles southeast of Florence) described by Bocaccio in the Decameron, but the earliest conclusive proof of jasmine’s presence in France is an illuminated border produced by Jean Bourdichon for the Great Hours of Anne of Brittany, c. 1501???1507. (John Harvey, Medieval Gardens, 1981.) Jasmine is intensively cultivated to this day at Grasse, which has been the center of the French fragrance industry since the Middle Ages. The English herbalist William Turner reported that jasmine grew abundantly in gardens around London by 1548. Read more »

The potted jasmines that perfume the gardens, and make a paradise of Trie Cloister, are in full flush and will??flower for many weeks to come. The jasmines sold as house plants by??nurseries and garden centers in the Northeast are often not the true or poet’s jasmine,??Jasminum officinale, but a more frost-tender species, Jasminum polyanthum. Sometimes called winter jasmine, it is very heavily scented, but not so sweetly fragrant as the poet’s jasmine.

Jasminum officinale has been at home in a sheltered, sunny??position in the bed under the parapet wall in Bonnefont Garden and has wintered over there for some years. The plants grown in terra rossa pots are the same species, but??are a distinct form, J. officinale forma affine.

The color of the buds on these beautiful plants is a deep pink, although the flowers, slightly larger than the species, open pure white.?? The fragrance is delightful even during the day. (Jasmines are most fragrant in the evening.??) Long prized for its scent, jasmine is still grown in great quantities at Grasse, which was already a center for perfumery in the Middle Ages.

Native to the Himalayas of western China and introduced into European gardens from the East, jasmine was a relative latecomer to those regions not in close contact with the Arab world.?? Read more »

Since we have received appreciations from so many thistle lovers, I thought I would finish out the series with the carline thistles, the last thistles in our medieval plant collection to bloom. Unlike other thistles, their flowers have a daisy form consisting of a disk with rayed petals. They are dry flowers of the “ever-lasting” type, sometimes described as straw flowers. The carline thistles are plants of poor, dry soils. The U.S.D.A. lists the common carline thistle, Carlina vulgaris, as an invasive weed reported in New York and New Jersey, but no other state, although I have never observed them in either. Has anyone seen it in their locale? (The U.S.D.A. site notes that it is not necessarily the case that a plant is established only in the states indicated by shading on their map. It may well grow elsewhere, but its presence has not been reported to the U.S.D.A.)

The perennial stemless species, Carlina acaulis, native to Europe, strongly resembles the closely related Eurasian biennial Carlina vulgaris, except that the rosette of spiny leaves lies close to the ground, while the common carline thistle has a short stem. The leaves of C. acaulis are also longer than those of C. vulgaris. Read more »

Left: Silybum marianum, the Marian thistle, is also known as milk thistle, because of the milky-white streaks on the spiny leaves; right: The thistle appears outside and below the enclosure of the captive Unicorn, near the Madonna lily (Lilium candidum), another plant associated with the Virgin. Visit the Collection Database to see the detail in context and learn more about The Unicorn in Captivity.

While thistles were a thorn in the farmer’s side, then as now, virtually all plants were accorded medicinal value in the Middle Ages. Milk thistle (Silybum marianum) was eaten as a vegetable, and is grown in a bed devoted to pottage plants here at The Cloisters, but it has a rightful place in the medicinal collection as well. Read more »