Medieval Gardens© Kirk Johnson
Nov 27, 1998
The traditional date for the fall of Rome is 476, but it isn't very accurate to say that Rome fell, since the Eastern part of the Roman Empire survived until the 15th Century as Byzantium. The Western part of the Roman Empire did go through a period of violent transformation, during which the urban culture of Imperial Rome was destroyed. The Romans had created landscape gardens as well as formal gardens. The tradition of landscape gardens didn't survive the breakdown of the Western Empire, but the formal tradition survived in monasteries. When I use the word "monastery", I mean an abbey ruled by an abbess or an abbot. The formal garden had grown out of agriculture and in the monasteries it reverted to practical gardening, but the formal structure was retained.
Saint Benedict of Nursia was born about 480 and died about 547, he wrote his Regula Monachoroum or Rule of Saint Benedict in 515, this placed a strong emphasis on the value of manual labor; unlike earlier monastic traditions which had focused on prayer. Benedictine monasteries did not try to live off of the charity of the local people, they always tried to be self-sufficient, so gardening was very important. At the same time, while manual labor was never seen as a form of prayer, there was a natural tendency for monastic gardens to be beautiful as well as practical, since gardening was seen as an activity which could calm troubled souls. No one really knows what early monastic gardens looked like, the earliest information about the appearance of monastic gardens comes from the plan of the monastery of Saint Gall, in Switzerland, this dates from the 9th Century. This plan shows rectangular beds separated by narrow paths, this is the characteristic Western European garden which was dominant until the English landscape gardens of the 18th centuries. The plan of Saint Gall also shows orchards, the combination of a formal garden of geometric beds next to an orchard was typical of Western European gardens until the 16th Century. It isn't certain that this style of garden survived from Ancient Rome, but it probably did, since this style of garden dates from Ancient Egypt. Monastic gardens were primarily devoted to the needs of the monastic community, their gardens were characterized by fish ponds, grape arbors, herbs and vegetables for food and medicine and flowers for the altar. It was these gardening skills which survived the breakdown of the Western Empire and the secular Medieval gardens were built on these skills.
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