Go to Home Page                                           
The Flora of the Sacred Nativity

Alfred E. P. Dowling, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd,
London, 1900


A Mary's Gardens Review

Contemporary re-appreciation in the UK of the Flowers of Our Lady
and other flowers of religious association from medieval popular
traditions may have had its beginnings with the publication of
Oxford Scholar, Alfred E. P. Dowling's The Flora of the Sacred
Nativity in 1900.

Beginning with a description of the pre-Reformation religious folk
customs and holy places of the Christmas season with which plants
and flowers were formerly associated - and for which they were
named - the "Flora" proposes that such flowers and plants, still
growing wild and in cultivation today, can be vehicles for the
rediscovery of the richness of such customs and of the
accompanying religious sense of nature.

It makes mention that companion volumes were to follow describing
flowers from the other liturgical celebrations through the year,
and of general association with the Blessed Virgin Mary, but
apparently these were never published.

The Flora lists numerous flowers from the U.K., the Continent
and Latin America with legends, symbolism, customs and names from
their associations with the liturgical celebrations of Advent,
Christmas, the Circumcision and giving of the Holy Name, Candlemas
or the Presentation in the Temple, Epiphany, the Massacre of the
Holy Innocents, the Flight into Egypt and the Repose in Egypt -
oral traditions and flower names largely suppressed by the
Reformation and the introduction of printing.

In this it serves as a religious folklore complement to Eamon
Duffy's recent The Stripping of the Altars (Yale University
Press, New Haven, 1992) describing the celebrations of
pre-Reformation rural life centered around the feasts of the
liturgical year, and chronicling their subsequent suppression.
Dowling's book could accordingly be termed "The Stripping of the
Meadows".

In the introductory chapter, "Flora Sacra", Dowling speaks
of the religious sense of nature in all cultures, and then shows
how pre-Reformation Christian popular culture both received from
and gave to nature, a special richness.

The religious sense of nature is so sought in human experience,
the book proposes, that when the fullness of the centuries-old
nature symbolism and celebration of Christ, the Holy Spirit and
the Blessed Virgin was suppressed at the Reformation, the
substitute classical Greek and Roman mythical plant lore and
derived scientific botanical namings introduced by the Renaissance
botanists were found inadequate by the human spirit.  Accordingly,
a new quest to discover the full religious sense of nature was
undertaken by Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, who sought to
find this sense in the poetic examination of nature itself.  While
this produced many exquisite poetic insights, the ultimate
conclusion of their quest, as observed by Coleridge, was that in
the end, we find in nature what we put into it.

Out of the Romantic Period came the Victorian love of flowers and
gardening, for which England is so renowned, but this love sought
its deeper meaning in the compilation of a broad range of plant
lore, more curious than reverential, and in listings of
imaginative "language of flowers", more sentimental than
devotional - still leaving the human spirit unsatisfied.

The post-Reformation scientific, romantic and Victorian
contributions to appreciation of nature and to communion with it
indeed heightened the religious sense of awe and love - of nature
and, for some, of nature's Creator, who shows forth and shares
with us the divine goodness in Creation.  But the human heart
awaits the restoration of the discovery in flowers of the full
wonder of our Redemption and Renewal as well as of our Creation,
that flowers may be truly those of the New Terrestrial Paradise,
mirroring the fullness of the Trinitarian spiritual truths of the
Divine Word, through whom both the natural and spiritual worlds
were created, and in whom these find their spiritual meaning and
culmination.

Our request of July, 1997, to Kegan Paul International for permission to post an extensive portion of The Flora of the Sacred
Nativity to this web site was declined for the reason that they
were "about to re-issue the book".  It is heartening to learn that the renewed interest in flowers of religious use and symbolism in the U.K. is judged sufficient to warrant this re-publication, after almost 100 years.  (It has not been re-issued as of October, 2000.)