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                                               Intro Mary Garden

Garden Catechism

God's Instructional Creatures

(Introduction to "In Mary's Garden" - 1955)


John S. Stokes, Jr.


     With the advent of universal education and literacy, parents
have come to regard religious training largely as formalized
instruction to be received from schools and books.  As a
consequence they are denying their children much of the more
spontaneous, direct and personal instruction which formerly was
given in the course of daily living in the home.  In the United
States, for example, it has been found that Catholic parents are
handing over to the parochial schools practically the entire task
of instructing their children in religion (Religious Blackout of
the Preschool Child, by Father John L. Thomas, S J.,
AMERICA, 3/8/52).

     Properly understood, parents' obligation is to provide
religious instruction as rapidly as their children are ready to
receive it; and at no time is children's learning process more
active and enduring than in the early, preschool years.  As Pope
Pius XII has said, "It is your task to begin their education in
soul and body from the cradle; for if you cannot educate them, they
will begin for good or ill to educate themselves."

     If children are not given a religious view of all things as
they first learn about them, subsequent religious instruction may
seem artificial and imposed.  And if such instruction is not begun
until school, there is the real danger that children will overly
identify religion with school, rebelling against it if they dislike
school, or falling away from it after school days are over.

     Yet religious instruction in the home can have its pitfalls,
too - as shown by the number of people going through life rebelling
against the religion of their parents, or against the "bearded old
man" or other representations of God given them in nursery
education.  Forced or rigidly formalized training in the words,
representations, exercises and practices of religion can be as
harmful as no religious instruction at all.

     Parents, of themselves, cannot give faith to their children,
any more than they can give life to a plant. Their responsibility
is rather one of stewardship to protect, nourish and cultivate the
seeds of faith and sanctifying grace received by their children
from God in the sacrament of Baptism.  And in this they are
assisted through the graces given and promised them in the
sacrament of holy matrimony.  Religion is a binding to God through
the increase of indwelling grace in the soul.

     Parents' first step towards fulfilling their teaching
obligation, therefore, is to recognize their dependence upon prayer
and the sacraments. "Ask and you shall receive."  Then, in so far
as there is a choice of teaching means they are prudently to select
those which will afford their children the most direct intuition
and discovery of God, and of God in relation to the basic realities
of the created, fallen, redeemed and providentially governed world.

     Such means as pictures, songs, stories, exercise books,
prayers, home altars, sacramentals, church visits, feast
celebrations, gift giving and family work sharing are fundamental
to preschool religious instruction.  But there is a certain reality
and life which are given to religion, too, by the immediacy and
directness of personal intuition, discovery and corroboration of
the kind which children can call their very own. Faith and morals
learned from parents through explanation, illustration, imitation,
participation and discipline are strengthened and confirmed through
opportunities for related but independent personal religious
intuition and activity.

     As a help in selecting means which will best afford children
such opportunity, we can examine to advantage the teaching methods
pioneered 200 years ago by educator, Friedrich Froebel.  Noting
with Johann Pestalozzi that distinctions, manipulation, composition
and expression learned from early object-lessons formed the basis
upon which skills in speaking, reading, writing, arithmetic and
verbal reasoning were later developed, he devised playthings and
games from which children could discover these fundamentals most
directly in the course of their voluntary play activity.  Following
after such preschool instruction, the work of first grade teachers
was greatly facilitated, thereby proving as false the then
prevalent notion that preparation for reading, writing, arithmetic
and the arts-crafts was something which could be left entirely to
the grade schools.

     Froebel's means of teaching through play activity were at
first used in kindergarten classes, - "kindergarten", or
"children's garden", being a name he originated to indicate that
the educator superintends the development of the child's inborn
faculties just as the gardener tends the growth of plant life
contained in the seed.  In our times such playthings and games have
been developed into the thoughtfully derived apparatus of the
Montessori method of instruction used in both "preschool" and
"school" instruction.

     Similar means are now also commercially available for home use
in "educational playthings".  One manufacturer, for example, offers
"technical and manipulative toys" . . . which "introduce the child
into our complex mechanical world by providing equipment which
encourages handling, shape, size and color discrimination, taking
apart, putting together, stringing, hammering, dressing and other
eye and hand discrimination tasks." "Pre-academic toys" provide "a
rich variety of experience to develop a readiness for numbers,
reading and geography."  "Scientific toys" offer opportunities for
discovery and invention.  "Artistic and musical toys" encourage
self expression . . . .

     Children's ability to grasp fundamental principles through
object-lessons is borne out strikingly in the teaching of
"structural arithmetic" with specially devised playthings and
games.  In the introduction to Children Discover Arithmetic,
by Dr. Catherine Stern, (Harpers, 1949), Professor Marguerite Lehr
writes:

     "All small children spontaneously engage in various forms of
     activity that the observing trained mathematician recognizes
     as a first form of behavior which, if repeated, could lead to
     a powerful mathematical notion.  These fundamental notions
     are simple and their manifestation in the child's acts seems
     trivial to the untrained observer.  It can fail to come to
     conscious form if it goes unnoticed, as it often does in
     small children.  When the child is playing in a situation
     carefully assembled to emphasize particular aspects of a
     potential number concept, these spontaneous expressions take
     sharper form.  I am struck by the fact that one childish
     remark after another shows unmistakable early forms of
     principles which I know have emerged under expert study as
     fundamental. . . . Those concepts which can precipitate
     directly from sensory experience are accessible to every
     normal young child.  We know that if they are to serve him
     well, he must feel as if he found them. . . . But he must be
     given every opportunity to formulate that information in the
     best and most serviceable form known to his own time.  That
     is the teacher's responsibility."

     Surely the proven effectiveness of such supervised object
lessons as means for preschool and even pre-verbal instruction
shows an early potential for learning and a method of instruction
which can also be ordered to religious ends.  Surely there are also
suitable object-lessons which can directly acquaint the baptized
child with the realities of God, nature, providence, sin, sacrifice
and redemption in such a way as to develop a readiness for prayer,
catechism and Mass.

     Mindful of St. Paul's teaching that we know God "through the
things that have been made", it behooves us to look to nature, the
direct creations of God, for such object-lessons.  Since religion
is a matter of life, we should look especially to living things,
such as the plant life of the garden.

     As living works of delicacy and beauty which far surpass the
products of man's art and science, plants and blooms raise the mind
to contemplation of the Infinite God, whose intellect, creativity
and life they manifest. Similarly, their energy and sustenance
received from sun, moisture, soil and air bear witness to the
infinite care with which God's providence orders the universe and
elements to the most immediate and particular ends. Each day God is
discovered anew in the wondrous unfolding of plants and blooms as
they rise up toward heaven.

     Plants are not to be "handled" and "manipulated" like
playthings.  One cannot take them apart and then put them back
together again.  As living, growing creatures of God, they have a
being, reality and dignity which demand respect, and needs which
call for loving, thoughtful and faithful stewardship. On the other
hand, the same delicacy which makes them so intimately dependent
upon and responsive to providence and stewardship also renders them
especially subject to injury, disease and death, - the effects of
original sin.

     But the garden also teaches at every hand that death, properly
seen, is only a transformation into new life.  The grain of wheat,
by dying, brings forth much fruit.  Dead leaves and plant cuttings
are transformed by the providential action of fungi, algae,
bacteria, earthworms and other soil life, in the presence of
certain minerals, into nourishment for plant life. Plant life, by
dying, serves in turn as food - directly, or indirectly through
animals - for humans, who crown the natural cycle of life and death
through the calling to incorporation into the supernatural life of
the Mystical Body of Christ.  Here before us in the garden we see
the total ordering of all life to God.

     In the garden, we are instructed also by the profound analogy
and correspondence between material life and spiritual life - both
created through the Word, "by whom all things were made" and thus
the basis of the many parables Jesus drew from plant life for our
instruction unto salvation.  By caring for life in its simpler
plant, animal and insect forms, children learn lessons of
stewardship which by analogy will have subsequent application to
the care of their own natural and supernatural life.  Religion is
not words, representations and practices; it is protecting,
nourishing, cultivating and ordering of the natural and
supernatural life received at birth and baptism unto the greater
glory of God, culminating in the building of his kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven, through Jesus Christ, who at the end of time
will transform it into the eternal new heaven and new earth.

     The garden - God's kindergarten - is a preparation both for
first grade and for eternal life.

     Since garden activity has the dignity of stewardship for real,
living things - God's creatures - which, under his providence, grow
and bear fruit, it provides children with goods which are uniquely
their own to offer to God as a grateful return of praise and
thanksgiving.  A shrine, therefore, is a most fitting garden
adjunct - serving as an aid and focus for prayer and for the
devotional offering of garden work and fruits to God.

     What can better create a readiness for saying the Rosary than
offering up roses at Our Lady's shrine?  What can better show the
deadly reality of the effects of original sin than the disease and
death of a plant which was being tended as an offering to God? What
can better prepare for participation at Mass than offering up one's
own home garden blooms and fruits at a crucifix? Yet all these
things can become part of the life of a small child still too young
to understand at the verbal level the words of prayers.

     Unlike man-made playthings, which have to be provided one
after another as children's ability to learn increases, God's same
creatures - seeds, plants and blooms - offer instruction to
children, and to adults, of all ages.  There is always more to
learn about the natural art and science of garden stewardship; and
God's plant life, like the revealed scriptures, contains endless
depths and riches of truth, which await the deepening of one's
vision. There is no end to man's making of play things and the
writing of books, but God's one and the same garden is an
inexhaustible and ever new reservoir of truth, beauty, joy and
instruction.  Each day, too, the art and science of plant
stewardship and garden composition encourage ingenuity, originality
and imagination - always ordered and disciplined, however,
according to the intelligible requirements of plant growth.  In the
garden one must live not only by feelings, emotions and impulses,
but by the intellect; and the intellect in turn is measured by
things.  Garden work contains its own discipline and is judged by
its own fruits.

     While the religious instruction to be received from the garden
is by no means automatic, plant life effectively recalls and
extends such instruction once it has been appropriately introduced
by parents.  Each day sacramentalized plant life and
supernaturalized garden activity give rise to questions which, when
answered by parents, provide children with an ever-deepening vision
of God and his creatures - leading in turn to still further
discoveries and questions.  Garden instruction, however, is not a
program of scheduled lessons or steps.  The parents have in mind
the entire catechism, but fill in the parts as occasioned by the
seasons, and by the children's development and each day's
activities - object-lessons normally preceding the words
articulating them.

     The Commandments, too, as well as faith and devotion, are
readily learned in the garden.  By viewing plants and blooms as
 creatures and effects, children learn to love God above all
things.  They see and honor their parents as instructing them in
the things of God and garden.  They learn reverence for life. They
learn to love purity from the unsullied beauty of blooms; and they
see that the primary end of insemination is the reproduction of the
species.  Instead of stealing, they learn to sow and reap, and to
save seeds, that there may be increase which they can share with
others.  False witness has no place in a work which is ordered to
devotion and to stewardship of physical plant requirements.  And,
finally, the good of one's neighbor's garden inspires not envy and
covetousness, but joy and thanksgiving - over still more fruits for
God and Our Lady.

     Always, the greatest potency of the garden as a means for
religious instruction comes from the fact that its purpose
transcends instruction.  It is first of all a prayerful, religious
work undertaken by the entire family, under the leadership and
example of the parents, for the greater glory of God. It is real.
The religious sense given the garden and gardening work by parents
is the "one thing necessary" from which all its other religious
fruits come.

     There is nothing new in turning to the garden as a means of
religious instruction.  We are looking, rather, to a restoration of
something which has been lost.  In our society and culture of
cities, book learning, and manufactured playthings, we forget that
before the comparatively recent introduction of printing, universal
education and mass production, parents were of necessity largely
dependent upon natural signs and symbols - "the things that are
made" - to instruct their children in the things of God. There are
indeed excellent means of religious instruction besides books, and
means of visual education other than pictures and representations.
And there is a long tradition to show parents what to do.

     To restore the former devotional and educational character and
use to gardening, parents have only to draw from the storehouse of
popular religious tradition.  In a former day the whole of creation
was truly seen as showing forth the glory of God.  By things
visible, we are led to things invisible. The countryside was God's
billboard; and each field a page in his picture magazine.  Most
like unto God, of course, was man, whom he created in his own
image, a little lower than the angels.  But animals, plants and
minerals, too, were seen as manifesting God's life, beauty and
riches, created so that the divine goodness might be shared with
humans and further shown forth and shared through their
participative building of the City of God on earth - the very
purpose of Creation.  They were also seen as signs and symbols of
spiritual things, and as such were woven into the litanies,
catechisms and theologies of popular oral tradition.

     The old plant names recalling God, Our Lady and the saints
were not the creatures of idle religious fancy that many people
today assume them to have been.  Nor were they only figures of
speech arising from poetic imagery. Through the correspondence, in
Creation, between material and spiritual things, they were very
real and practical providentially bestowed aids to popular
religious devotion and instruction.  Seen according to their
religious names, plants were signs which cut past all verbal
argument and spoke directly to the heart. And the garden itself is
an age old symbol of Paradise.  Such riches of popular tradition
helped form the tough, true cultural and educational foundation of
the Age of Faith.

     A striking example of the religious view of nature by
children, instructed  by religious parents, was that of the
shepherd children of La Salette who, as they rested for their
repast, made of stones and wild flowers what in their own words
they described as a "paradise", to which Our Lady was, as it were,
draw down when she appeared to them.

     Words can be argued back and forth and books can be banned and
burned, but the forms and colors of religious plant symbolism
cannot be tampered with, rewritten or destroyed.  Witness, for
example, the sign of the shamrock, "signature" of the Trinity,
discerned and taught by St. Patrick, and which has endured in
popular tradition for fifteen centuries.

     A striking instance and adaptation of the educational use of
plant signs is that of the Passion Flower of Central and South
America, which was seen, named and used by missionary priests from
the old world to represent our Lord's Passion to the illiterate
peoples of those lands.  In this one remarkably formed plant and
bloom were found parts which could be seen to recall the Blessed
Trinity, the world which Christ came to save, the apostles, the
lash, the crown of thorns, the Cross, the three nails, the five
wounds, the sponge, the centurion's lance, the spices prepared by
the holy women and the mourning garments.

     That these associations are offered today as curiosities for
the tourist trade should not blind us to their very real
educational value in a former day when there were no printed
pictures or Mass cards for distribution to the peoples of mission
lands.  As living, reproducing, plants and blooms, Passion Flower
blooms were generated by the thousands each year in nature. Perhaps
even today they are being used by parents to instruct their
children in our Lord's Passion in regions where priests have never
been or to which, after visiting, they have never returned.

     In the old popular traditions of Christendom, plants and
blooms were seen especially as recalling Our Lady and her life.
Their old names formed entire litanies to her.  As the English
writer Hepworth Dixon has said, "The poetry no less than the piety
of Europe has ascribed to her the whole bloom and coloring of the
fields and hedges."  This was but a continuation of the tradition
of the Church Fathers, who saw Our Lady at the very heart of
nature, and who saw as anticipating her in revelation the
references to nature in the passages from Proverbs, Wisdom, the
Canticle of Canticles and Ecclesiasticus which they incorporated in
the liturgies for her feast days.  Such a view of plants and blooms
was also that of St. Francis, who took care not to injure even the
smallest plant - from which might spring a rose, emblem of Our
Lady, the Rose of Sharon.

     The potency which religious plant signs must once have had for
children is suggested by the revolution brought about in the
present-day toy industry by the introduction of toy tie-ins.  As
American Business reported in a December, 1953, article, "Profits
Through Toy Tie-Ins":

     "Parents can point out toys they think their children should
     have, but unless there is a tie-in with some person, or
     product the child is familiar with the time is wasted...
     Toy manufacturers are reluctant to market a new toy unless it
     has some association with a TV character, movie hero or some
     famous product...The demand by children for 'the real thing,
     just like Mummy's or Daddy's, is today making the billion-
     dollar toy industry go tie-in crazy...The	new twist in all
     this has been the rash of cooperative deals that (major
     companies) have been making with toy manufacturers this year."

     Such toy tie-ins with fictitious characters and manufactured
products are based on a secular rediscovery of the very same
potential which was developed according to higher, religious ends
in the old devotional and instructional use of plant life as God's
creatures and as signs and emblems of real persons: Our Lady and
the Saints.

     Just as present-day manufacturers and advertisers encourage
children to play with guns, hats, chaps, lassos, spurs, etc. as
tie-ins with cowboy heroes of the movies and TV, so evidently did
parents once show their children how to view, and perhaps to sow
and tend, certain plants and blooms out of devotion to their
Heavenly Mother and Mediatrix with God.	 But whereas children now
fight in a play world against imaginary robbers and Indians,
formerly they were united with their parents, under the protecting
mantle of God's grace, Our Lady, the angels and the saints in
battling the real adversary, the devil, who goes about the world
like a roaring lion seeking the destruction of souls.

     And it can be so, again, today.  Seen once more according to
their Mary names, for example, plants and blooms can afford souls a
nourishment which has been distilled from centuries of popular
devotion.  Such commonly grown flowers as marigolds, scabiosa,
forget-me-not and balsam regain instantly their neglected power to
enkindle hearts with intimate love and contemplation of Our Lady,
once they are brought back into focus as "Mary's Gold," "Our Lady's
Pincushion," "Eyes of Mary" and "Our Lady's Earrings." And there
are many others.

     As Rev. James J. Galvin, C.SS.R. has said in "My Garden Prays"
(Perpetual Help, February, 1952):

     "Gardens should pray!  Gardens should remind children of
     their mother.  Gardens should be holy places that keep minds
     as fresh and unsullied as Madonna lilies.  Gardens should
     chime with names that ring like the Litany of Loreto.  And
     gardens, if they are truly Mary Gardens, will naturally
     lead to Christ."

     You can start a Mary Garden with your children this spring.


Copyright, Mary's Gardens 1955, 1998


For an example of garden teaching of religion see:

     In Mary's Garden