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Intro Mary Garden
Nature and Gardening in Celtic Christian
Tradition
John S. Stokes Jr.
. An especially meaningful tradition
for us at Mary's Gardens has been that
of the Irish Celtic Christianity of St.
Patrick, of St. Colomban, and of St.
Fiacre, the patron saint of gardeners -
a tradition which so eminently fulfills
the yearning of human love for the
discovery in nature, flowers and
gardening of the revealed spiritual
world of God, heaven and the divine
saving action. This essential place
of nature in Irish Celtic Christianity
has its origins in St. Patrick's
missionary teaching and demonstration
that the traditional Irish Druidic and
Celtic love of nature, as the dwelling
place of their Gods, found a higher
fulfillment in Christian love of
nature as showing forth and sharing
the goodness and power of its Creator,
the one true trinitarian God.
In the tradition of Moses' demonstration of the power of the
One God over that of Pharoah and his magicians, and of Elija's
demonstration of the power of Jehovah over that of the Prophets of
Baal, St. Patrick proclaimed and demonstrated the goodness and
power of the Trinitarian God through his ecclesiastical blessing,
which banished from nature the power of the false Druidic and
Celtic gods.
This is signified by the trinitarian symbolism of the
three-lobed shamrock, and set forth in "The Breastplate of
St.Patrick":
"I bind to myself today
The strong virtue of the invocation of the Trinity;
I believe the Trinity in Unity
The Creator of the Universe.
"I bind to myself today
The virtue of the Incarnation of Christ with his baptism,
The virtue of his crucifixion with his burial,
The virtue of his resurrection with his ascension,
The virtue of his coming on the Judgement Day.
. . .
"I bind to myself today
The power of heaven,
The light of the sun,
The brightness of the moon,
The splendor of fire,
The flashing of lightning,
The swiftness of wind,
The depth of sea,
The stabiliy of earth,
The compactnesss of Rocks.
. . .
"I invoke today all these virtues
Against every hostile, merciless power
Which may assail my body and my soul,
Against the incantations of false prophets,
Against the black laws of heathenism,
Against the false laws of heresy,
Against the deceits of idolatry,
Against every knowlege that binds the soul of man."
. . .
The Rural Life Prayer Book
While Roman pleasure gardens were rejected by Christian
asceticism because of their hedonism, the Celtic love of nature was
retained and enhanced in Celtic Christianity as a foundation on
which to build the faith, which flourished in Ireland and was then
spread by Irish missionaries to other countries and peoples of
Europe.
Thus, in the seventh century, St. Fiacre emigrated to France,
where he established a garden of healing herbs and flowers around
an Oratory of the Blessed Virgin, near Meaux - showing forth both
his love for gardening, and also his Marian devotion, integral to
Celtic Christianity from St. Patrick's devotion and recourse to
Mary with all the awe and love of the proclamation of the Council
of Ephesus the year before he came to Ireland that Mary, Mother of
Jesus, true God and true Man, was the very Mother of God.
The natural and miraculous cures effected by St. Fiacre became
so renowned that it was necessary for him to construct a hospice to
accomodate all who came to his garden shrine for healing, and
accordingly he came to be regarded throughout Christendom as the
patron saint of gardening. The horse drawn carriages taking people
from Paris to his hospice came to be known as "fiacres", a term
applied to Parisian taxi cabs until this very day.
Another Irish missionary to the continent was St. Gall, who
spent the last 30 years of his life in Switzerland, and had a
renowned garden at his monastery near Lake Constance - one of the
few medieval monastery gardens whose plant lists and planting plans
have been preserved today.
While monastically-based Celtic Catholicism flourished in
Ireland for a number of centuries - thanks to the insular
protection of Ireland both from Roman conquest and from the Roman
collapse and ensuing dark ages - it in time became overlayed by and
incorporated in continental Catholicism, less focused on nature yet
retaining the vitality of its Celtic origins as an undercurrent, as
celebrated in St.Patrick and the early saints.
Of special note in regard to Celtic religious tradition in
gardening are the old Gaelic Mary, or "Mhuire", names of flowers,
of which Alfred Dowling states in The Flora of the Sacred Nativity
(London, 1900):
"The Christian flora has been the gradual growth
of the ages, the offspring of pious thought among
pious people, and arose in many ways. Many of the
dedications must be of venerable antiquity, since
to gain the hold they have in the familiar and
old-world thought of a people is the result of
centuries of quiet observance; those that we find
existing among Gaelic-speaking people must be very
early examples."
It is to Ireland's Celtic, nature-based, Catholic roots that
we attribute the early special appreciation there for the
restoration of Marian popular traditions in flowers and gardens -
as witnessed by the Irish Ecclesiastical Record article, "Mary
Gardens", by Robert Ostermann of February, 1953, published less
than two years after Mary's Gardens was founded in the United
States.
Following this, a number of articles on the Flowers of Our
Lady and Mary Gardens were re-printed in Ireland from United States
magazines and in 1958 the Francisan Press in Dublin published a
book of water color paintings of Our Lady's Flowers by the
Irish artist, Beldy. In March, 1961 our article, "Mary-Gardening
With St. Francis" was published in the magazine, Assisi, also of
the Franciscan Press - a most beautiful response to which was the
gift from the Irish poet, Lliam Brophy, of the poem, "Gardens Give
Mary Glory".
Then, in 1972, Mary-Gardening in Ireland entered the high road
of its development thanks to the initiative of Brother Sean
MacNamara, C.F.C, of the Christian Brothers in Dublin, who
contacted us, after learning of our work, in the hope that through
our research he could find fuller support for his personal
intuitive sense of unity between his love for Mary and the love for
flowers and gardening.
Copyright Mary's Gardens, 1997