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                                               Intro Mary Garden
Sacred Flora

Alfred E. P. Dowling          From Plants of the Sacred Nativity,
                              London, 1900



       We commend the study of the sacred flora as
 a wide and inspiring field of fresh interest, a
 continual source of mingled instructiveness and
 of food for the highest thought.  To the men of
 the moyen Age the Kalendar has been said to
 have been Devotion's Diary and Mirth's Manual,
 and we might add that Nature was its illustrated
 Supplement.  Birds, flowers, and stars were all
 enlisted to help them in the expression of their
 rational enjoyment in life; their bodies and
 souls, minds and hearts, were all united in
 making the completion of their happiness. . . .

     The world was truly merrie when men looked to the Church and
to Nature as the partners of their mirth.  Carol-tyde brought with
it festivities of every kind, but all prompted by the
commemoration that it honoured.  Nature helped, with its lessons
and illustrations, to increase the mirthfulness of man, and the
Burning Bush of Holly, the Jesse Tree of Mistletoe, the Christmas
Roses of the Shepherd Maid, Stars of Bethlehem for the Epiphany,
and many another emblem it offered to deck the churches and homes
of the people.

     Passion-tyde and Easter came on, and again in the floral
division of natural subjects, emblems and types were appearing
on every roadside and meadow to help man's recollected and
appreciative gaze.  Trinity, Pentecost, Corpus Christi and the
Assumption followed, completing those Seven Stars, the
Constellation of the Church's Year, and for them all nature
rendered its tribute and earth yielded its fruit.  Nor were the
memorials in Nature confined to the great feasts or fasts, for
scattered on every side about that firmament in which shone the
seven greater lights are to be found, as lesser luminaries, the
saints of God whose dedications among the flowers range from a
single bud to the Galaxy of Mary.

     What a new world of delight there is in this study!  What a
vision of peace it reveals in its intellectual, artistic, and
spiritual resources!  Where is the limit to the real education -
the leading forth of man's mental and moral capabilities - that
such garden studies would bestow, giving education in its highest,
widest, and truest sense?  To children with their innate love of
Nature the most profound truths in dogmatic theology, to say
nothing of the most needful lessons in moral culture, can be
taught with the most penetrating and lasting effect if natural
symbolism be employed.

     The sweet purity of child life, undimmed by the world's
blight, drinks in lessons from the flowers, as the bee imbibes and
assimilates their honey, and yet we scarcely ever find them so
employed.  Is reverence for Nature diminished, the religious truth
forgotten, or the instruction wearisome when the mother points to
the robin's scarlet breast or the cross-bill's twisted beak, and
repeats to the eager listener what pious hearts have told as to
how those badges were won?  Will a child recklessly pluck or
wantonly injure the Nigella with the dimmed Eye, or the
Blood-sprinkled Orchis, if he know what they recalled to Christian
eyes long closed?  It was never so needful as it is to-day that
parents should encourage such a love for Nature, and it eminently
belongs to home-teaching to foster the dispositions that such
teaching engenders.

               "Earth is crammed with Heaven,
               And every common bush afire with God."