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                                               Intro Mary Garden

The Flowers of Our Lady and Mary Gardens


Mary Garden Literature Distribution


The following linked texts from this Mary's Gardens Internet web
site are suggested for use in preparing literature handouts for
distribution at local parish and gardening meetings.


  a - Flowers of Our Lady

  b - Our Lady's Garden

  c - Historical Background (below)

  d - Lillie Tower - First Public U.S. Mary Garden

  e - Beginning 12 Variety Annuals Mary Garden

  f - List of 100 Popular Flowers of Our Lady

  g - Flowers For the Fairest - Starting a Mary Garden (with Flower
      List)

  h - In Mary's Garden - A Family Mary Garden (with Flower List)

  i - Parish Mary Garden Care


Permission is granted to reprint these or other Mary's Gardens web
site texts, or selected excerpts from one or more  - with addition
of any local commentary, and with inclusion of a credit to Mary's
Gardens and a listing of the Mary's Gardens web site address:

     www.mgardens.org.



                            o O o



The Flowers of Our Lady and Mary Gardens


Historical Background

The Flowers of Our Lady are flowers which were named devotionally
as symbols of the life, virtues and mysteries of the Blessed
Virgin and her Divine Son in the popular oral religious traditions
of the medieval countrysides.

Largely passed over by the writers of the first printed gardening
books in favor of secular common names, these old religious names
for wild flowers - many also cultivated in gardens - were largely
unknown to gardeners for several centuries, although providentially
they were preserved through their re-discovery and recording in the
field research of folklorists and botanists.

Through Alfred Dowling's Plants of the Sacred Nativity (1900)
and Judith Smith's The Mary Calendar (1930) these flower names
were once more brought to public attention.  Learning of them from
English monastery gardens, Frances Crane Lillie in 1932
established a Mary Garden of some 40 flowers so named beside the
Angelus Tower built by her several years previously for St.
Joseph's Church in Woods Hole, on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

In the Woods Hole Mary Garden, where the flowers were identified
by plant markers and were listed in a leaflet available in the
small library room at the base of the Angelus tower, visitors were
introduced to another dimension of the medieval piety of the Age
of Faith of the great cathedrals.  Through Mary's symbolic flowers,
an insight was restored as to how the Marian devotion of church
altars, home rosaries and Our Lady's appearance sites can be
quickened also in daily life.

Inspired by the Woods Hole Mary Garden, two Philadelphians, with
Mrs. Lille's blessing, established the spare-time project, Mary's
Gardens, in 1951 to undertake further research into the Flowers of
Our Lady in various countries; and - through lectures, magazine
articles, press notices and exhibits - to inspire the planting of
Mary Gardens, large or small, at homes, schools, parishes and
shrines. The work was subsequently moved to Idaho and then to New
England.


Now, with the establishent of the Mary's Gardens Internet web site
(http:/www.mgardens.org) in 1995, we are able to make our over 45
years of written materials and flower and garden photos more
widely and currently available.  Historically this is a
continuation in the present-day "global village" of the original
spread of this devotional custom in medieval villages - by itinerate
preachers, mendicant monks, wandering minstrels, roving players,
pilgrims and other travellers.

A key link in the spread of flower devotion to Our Lady today is,
as in medieval times, the initiative of individuals who are
personally attracted to it upon learning of it from the broader
culture, and who are inspired to spread it among others in their
own communities.  For this all are welcome to download, print
out, and photocopy texts and photos of their choice from the
Internet Mary's Gardens web site for distribution informally or at
meetings.