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    All Saints                                       All Souls   

                                          marysgardens@mgardens.org
                                          November, 1995


Friends,

     November greetings from Mary's Gardens, and Welcome to new
visitors to our home page.

     In this season of All Saints each year we review our Mary
Garden Prayer for its adequacy in encompassing the various aspects
of our work.

     Teilhard de Chardin notes how the Church has composed a new
prayer each time a facet of the deposit of faith has ripened
sufficiently in the mind of the Church for definition as doctrine or
dogma.

     We endeavor to imitate this tradition by augmenting the Mary
Garden Prayer as our understanding of the doctrinal foundation for
our work is clarified - this year adding to the litany of Garden
Saints:

          "St. Bonaventure, proclaimer of the fullness of Mary's
          blessed and immaculate magnification of the divine
          goodness and saving action."

(after our reading of St. Bonaventure's "Mirror of the Blessed
Virgin Mary", posted on the Internet).

                             o O o


     Among the photographs and descriptions of representative Mary
Gardens added in this month of All Souls to our developing web page,
we call special attention to those of the

Mary Garden of Remembrance at the burial plot of the Artane
Oratory of the Resurrection in Dublin, designed and planted by Irish
Mary's Gardens Associate, Brother Sean MacNamara, of the Christian
Brothers, in 1992.

The introduction of the garden leaflet sets forth the quickening
provided by the flowers to prayer for the souls of the departed
buried there - and also for us, the living, as we seek better to
know and love God and to build heaven on earth:

     "The Garden of Remembrance commemorates the souls of the
     members of the Christian Brothers community and pupils, of
     beloved memory, laid to rest here - the blooming plants
     conveying a sense of their heavenly blossoming.

     "The plants likewise awaken remembrance of our own heavenly
     destiny; and also of the earthly paradise we are called
     upon to restore and the Peaceable Kingdom of love and
     justice we are to build, as instruments of the Spirit, in
     the redeemed world - in hopeful anticipation of their
     transformation into the New Heaven and New Earth on the
     last day.
 
     "To this end we can look to the flowering plants as direct
     creations of God, showing forth the divine beauty and
     splendor - to be emulated everywhere in Creation and in
     human society as a magnification of God's glory.
 
     "We can also call upon the rich flower and plant imagery
     and symbolism from scripture, liturgy and pious tradition
     to quicken remembrance of the revelation of the Trinity,
     and of the redemptive life, death and resurrection of
     Jesus, with which we are spiritually to unite ourselves. . . "


Horticulturally the garden represents a superb combination of old
species and contemporary strains of the Flowers of Our Lady, "some
things old and some things new" - a selection made by Brother Sean,
drawing on his experience as student of Irish Marian history, as
botanical researcher of the plants in the County Clare Burren, as
flower show judge, as former President of the Irish Garden Society,
and as co-designer of the National Irish Mary Garden at the Knock
Shrine of Our Lady in County Mayo.

     Other Gardens for which information has been added this month
include:

Shrine Mary Garden in raised beds, with Grotto, surrounding the
Blessed Sacrament Chapel at the Knock Shrine of Our Lady in
County Clare, Ireland - established in 1983.  Includes "Mhuire"
flowers named for Our Lady in medieval Gaelic.  40 page illustrated
booklet available from Shrine gift shop.

Parish Mary Garden at St. Joseph's Church, Woods Hole on Cape Cod,
Massachusetts - Mother Mary Garden of the contemporary Mary Garden
revival - established in 1932 at the Angelus Tower across the street
from the church, with a planting featuring English wild flowers
perceived and named as symbols of Mary's life and mysteries in the
pre-reformation English countrysides.

Home Mary Garden in which a five year old girl learns of Marian
devotion and doctrine from the flower symbolism and the events of
the garden.  The birds weave a nest of twigs around the base of
a figurine of the Virgin and Child newly installed in a focal
wayside shrine shelter "because there wasn't any straw in the
manger".

School Mary Garden in Philadelphia, as originally planted
in 1965 by the students and maintained for ten years, although now
diminished - raising the question for us at Mary's Gardens as to
how better to assist in the establishment of supportive Mary Garden
societies or guilds to perpetuate the maintenance and devotional
and instructional use of institutional Mary Gardens through the
years, until the end of the world.

                             o O o

It is hoped that learning of these various Mary Gardens for the
prayerful growing of the Flowers of Our Lady - and of others to
be illustrated and described - will inspire you who visit our web
site, or those you talk to, to plant Mary Gardens at your homes,
schools, parishes and shrines to spread the richness of medieval
piety and devotion to Our Lady in the modern world.  For assistance
in this we will provide updated lists in February of mail order
sources of seeds, bulbs and plants for the most commonly grown
Mary Garden flowers.


Sincerely,

Mary's Gardens

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