Go to Home Page
                                               Intro Mary Garden
 
Prison Mary Gardens

John S. Stokes Jr.

     In our first "Our Lady's Garden" offering of Mary Garden
materials in 1951, Mary's Gardens co-founder, Edward A. G. McTague
wrote:

     "Mindful of Tradition and Church teaching, Mary's
     Gardens is an act of faith. "Our Lady's Garden" is
     first of all an appeal to the heart.  May it be that
     as you read the names and descriptions of the Flowers
     of Our Lady they may bloom spiritually within your
     interior life.  Then, with your garden stewardship,
     foliage, buds and blooms will come of God's creatures
     the seeds, in due season and according to his established
     order."

     Among the many hearts which have responded to that appeal,
are those of two prisoners.  The first, from a New York state
prison, responded to one of the very first notices of our work, in
the gardening section of the now defunct New York Herald Tribune.
And in the course of our correspondence, before he had a chance to
do much gardening, we were able to assist him in obtaining a
parole job, through the Catholic Interracial Council of
Philadelphia.

     As an instance of the mysterious ways in which God's
providence works, this led to an invitation to give a lecture at
a communion breakfast of the Council, the notes for which we
converted into our first article, "Gardening For Our Lady",
published in America magazine for March 8, 1952.  This article in
turn inspired author Robert Ostermann to write his article, "Mary
Gardens" for the Irish Ecclesiastical Record of February, 1953,
which, through a chain of events, brought us in 1962 our Irish
Associate, Brother Sean MacNamara of the Christian Brothers in
Dublin.  Brother Sean's review of a book describing the golden
jubilee of the Garden of Our Lady in Woods Hole, Massachsetts in
1982, prompted Msgr. James Horan, Shrine Director, to establish
the Mary Garden at the Shrine of Our Lady in Knock, County Clare
in 1983.

     The NY Herald Tribune notice brought us also, among others,
Daniel J. Foley, author, and Editor of Horticulture magazine, who
through his article, "Mary Gardens" in The Herbarist, for 1953,
publication of The Herb Society of America, introduced our work to
gardening readers, which through another providential chain of
events led to the founding of the renowned parish Mary Garden at
St. Mary's Church in Annapolis, adjacent to historic Carroll
House in 1989.

.    The article, "My Garden
Prays", in Perpetual Help
magazine for February, 1952,
with the accompanying illus-
tration, briefly told the
story, with some imaginative
ramifications, of the prison
Mary Gardener released on
parole.

     Then, in 1983, our assoc-
iate, Bonnie Roberson, of Hag-
erman, Idaho, told us of some
prisoners in the Idaho State
Penitentiary who had read sev-
eral of her numerous articles
on Mary-Gardening in her dio-
cesan paper, the Boise, Idaho
Register, and had established
a prison Our Lady of Guadalupe Mary Garden, per the accompanying
clipping. (This photograph reminds us of Lowell Naeve's book on
his prison exeriences, A Field of Broken Stones).

.

     We ourselves have been heartened by the universal appeal of
the Flowers of Our Lady to hearts, and feel privileged to have
been able to undertake this work, and to now make it known to a
larger audience through the Internet.