MEDIEVAL GARDENS 



and also " to be of much use in ornament." 

 But indeed most flowers were not only used 

 for chaplets, and for strewing on the floor, but 

 were also painted on the chamber walls, and 

 embroidered on the hangings, to serve in winter 

 days as sweet memories and as sweeter hopes. 



Apparently the earliest records of gardens, 

 after Roman times, date from the ninth century, 

 and are mostly to be found amongst monastic ' 

 archives. A garden was an important, and even 

 essential, annex of a monastery, not only because 

 of the " herbularis " or physic garden, from the 

 herbs of which the monks compounded salves 

 and potions for the wounded knight or the 

 plundered wayfarer who might take shelter 

 within its protecting walls, but also because of 

 the solace which the shady trees and the gay 

 flowers brought to the sick, for a monastery was 

 generally a hospital as well. St. Bernard of 

 Clairvaux, speaking of an abbey garden, gives 

 a charming picture of one of these cloistered 

 pleasaunces for the sick and the aged. He 

 says : 



Within the enclosure of this wall many and various trees, 

 prolific in various fruits, constitute an orchard resembling a 

 wood, which, being near the cell of the sick, lightens the 

 infirmities of the brethren with no moderate solace, while it 

 affords a spacious walking place to those who walk and a 

 sweet place for reclining to those who are overheated. Where 

 the orchard terminates the garden begins. Here also a 

 beautiful spectacle is exhibited to the infirm brethren : while 

 they sit upon the green margin of the huge basin, they see 

 the little fishes playing under the water and representing a 

 military encounter by swimming to meet each other. 



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