The Greek & Roman civilizations mixed scientific knowledge of healing plants & folk wisdom before the decline & fall of the Roman Empire, leading to the Dark Ages in the West. However, horticultural information & technology survived in monastic gardens in the early medieval period. The classical documents were preserved by the Arabs, & many were translated by Jewish scholars. In Europe, life increasingly revolved around the church & the clergy & the monastery became the glue holding togther groups of people in villages & towns.
In the early centuries of the Christian era & in the Middle Ages, monasteries functioned as local hospitals, which meant that the herb garden was an essential part of the surrounding community’s well-being. When barbarian tribes invaded the collapsing Roman Empire 476 CE, monasteries were the primary organizations that preserved medical knowlege.The monks preserved knowledge of medicinal plants & their uses, in order to minister to the community. The church preached that God had imbued certain plants with healing powers at the time of creation. Many believed that sin led to illness, & only through the combined forces of belief & the ingestion of herbs prescribed by the monks could one be absolved of sin & healed.
From the scant information that survives, we believe that much like gardens in ancient civilizations, the typical medieval garden was a walled square or rectangular, drawn into quadrants. Many had a central fountain or water basin, similar to the river described in Genesis 2:10 that “flows out of Eden to water the Garden; & from there it divides & becomes four branches.” Within the cloister of monasteries & abbeys, there typically would be a hortus conclusus or garden of medicinal plants.
The plan for the Benedictine Monastery at St. Gall, from around 816, which also reveals much about the physical layout of monastic life. It included a main cloister, a vegetable garden divided into separate beds, & an orchard used as a burial ground. There was a physic garden where plants with healing possibilities were grown in rectangular beds.
Another well-recognized early monastic garden was Reichenau in Germany whose prior, Walahfrid Strabo (808–849), had been the teacher of Charles the Bold at Aix-la-Chapelle & whose verses extolled the virtues of learning about plants by working daily with them.
The hortus conclusus or physic garden was originally intended to treat monks who were ill or declining with age. Typically, decoctions were made from the medicinally active plants (“simples”) within the garden. But as important as the physic garden was in this
culture, the monks’ knowledge of the use of simples was even more essential. Monasteries were vital storehouses of healing traditions that dated back to ancient times. Latin translations of De Material Medica by Dioscorides & of Qanun by the Persian polymath, AbūAlı̄ al-Husayn (980–1037) known in the West as Avicenna, became standard medical texts for use by the monasteries. The monks, however, did not rely exclusively on the classics. It is said that pilgrims & travelers who sought sanctuary at the monasteries often brought with them new plants & new uses. Unfortunately, the only mechanism for sharing this the early knowledge was through handwritten texts, a laborious & expensive process which some monks dedicated their lives to dong.
See: Western Botanical Gardens: History and Evolution Donald A. Rakow Section of Horticulture School of Integrative Plant Science Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Ithaca, NY USA & Sharon A. Lee Sharon Lee and Associates Swarthmore, PA USA
