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                                       Intro Mary Garden
                                       It's a Quiet Little Spot


How does your Mary Garden grow?

By Jeannie Marshall                             National Post
                                                October __, 1999

     As she pokes around among her flowers, now past their prime
but many still in bloom, Lauretta Santarossa fails to notice that
it's raining.  She has noticed in an aesthetic sense: "Look at how
the water pearls up on the leaves of this Lady's Mantle," she says,
and sinks to the wet ground to have a closer look.  The fact that
her clothes are becoming quite damp seems not to have crossed her
mind.

     Santarossa's garden is a genuine passion for her, one which
she has combined with another important aspect of her life: her
Catholicism.

     Many Catholics express their religious devotion in a visual
manner with pictures and statues of Christ, the saints and the
Virgin Mary.  Santarossa has adorned her Toronto home with a
variety of depictions of Mary from all over the world.  But she has
also gone one step further in her veneration of Mary by creating a
Mary Garden in her small city backyard: all the flowers are named
for the Virgin Mary.

     "I would love to have a Japanese style garden, but I'm too
Italian.  I love colour," jokes Santarossa as she shifts wet vines
along a fence to allow the few remaining Rose of Sharon blossoms
more room.

  

     Santarossa, who has short red hair, gold-rimmed glasses and a
face that scrunches up warmly and pleasingly every time she laughs,
loves to garden but doesn't consider herself a great gardener.  She
started her Mary Garden about five years ago after talking with a
landscape design student, who was doing some work at Santarossa's
office, about redesigning her small, square, shady garden to make
it more interesting.  He knew of her Catholic background - she
works for the Catholic publisher Novalis - and suggested she plant
a Mary Garden.

     "I just thought, what a great idea.  I knew the idea of the
gardens because I had lived in a religious community called Madonna
House where we had a file on Mary Gardens.  They were really big in
the 1950's," says Santarossa.

Gardens in which all the flowers are named for the Virgin
Mary are coming back in vogue

     She went to the Internet for more information and found a
whole Web site devoted to the subject at www.mgardens.org.  The
site is run by John Stokes, who was one of the original
missionaries of the Mary Garden in Pennsylvania in the 1950's.  It
offers an archive of articles written about Mary Gardens, about
their origins as a medieval tradition, as well as a useful list of
plants known as Mariana because their names symbolize God, the
Virgin Mary, the angels and the saints.

     There are hundreds of such plants and most are common to any
garden centre. Among them are Marigolds, which is really Mary's
Gold, and Mayflower, which is Mary's Flower, or Thrift, which have
small pink flowers and spikes and are known as Our Lady's Pin
Cushion.  Canterbury Bells are called Our Lady's Night Cap because
they look like an old-fashioned nightcap, and Fuchsia is also known
as Our Lady's Eardrops because the flowers resemble pendant
earrings.

     "I'm always adding bulbs and in the spring there is a lot of
colour.  I try to have only a few of any one thing. I don't have a
mass of anything because it's such a small garden and I like
variety," says Santarossa.

     She pulls some leaves away from a small plant with spotted
green leaves. "It's known as Mary's Milk.  The legend is that when
Mary nursed the infant Jesus on the road to Egypt some of her milk
spilled onto this plant and it has been spotted with white ever
since."

     The garden is square but everything is organized on a
diagonal. There is a small, bricked-in space for a patio table.
"I gathered all the bricks up from my neighbours.  For some reason,
everybody has bricks in their, backyard," she says.

     In the southeast corner of the yard is a small podium. At the
moment, there is only a wrought iron garden ornament perched on it.
But this will be the place for the icon of the Virgin once
Santarossa can find one that pleases her.

     She has bought several already. "I have a Madonna from Italy
that I like.  She's kind of hokeylooking but nice, too.  She's got
a mantle and she looks to be protecting the people."

     The problem is that none of them seems quite right once she
gets them into the garden.  It's got to be just the right one, and
in the meantime, her rooms are becoming full of images of Mary.
There are brightly coloured wooden ones (can't take the elements),
painted versions (also too delicate), primitive (too primitive) and
modern (just doesn't work).

     Across from where the Madonna will eventually reside,
Santarossa has placed a bench inlaid with beautiful stained glass.
It is intended to be a meditation area.

     Santarossa has interested some friends in Mary Gardens.  As
yet, none of them have devoted their entire garden to the Virgin,
but many have begun deliberately planting flowers that they know
have a connection to Mary.

     "I think there is a revival of the Mary Garden," she says,
because of the easy availability of information on the Internet and
in the library.  She has also been instrumental in helping the
author of a book about Mary Gardens find a publisher.  The book,
Mary's Flowers Gardens, Legends and Meditations, by Vincenzina
Krymow, is being published this fall (1999) by  St. Anthony
Messenger Press in the U.S. and by Novalis in Canada.  Both are
Catholic publishers.

     Mary Gardens tend to be formal because they often place Mary
in the centre and then the flowers grow up all around her.  But
Santarossa wanted hers to be a little more free.

     "I like the formal and beautiful gardens but I like the
artfulness of this. I just like the idea of making something
beautiful," she says, explaining how inspiring she has found the
shrines to Mary that people build by the roadside in parts of
Europe.

     "Mary is a protector of the poor. She's like a mother.  She's
very positive.  In the West we've made her pure and the Virgin and
that's important, but for many people she's just more of a mother.
She cares for Jesus and she will care for you,". says Santarossa.
Then she rifles through her papers and files and says, "And there's
just a big whack of information that you can find on her."

Reprinted with permission.