WALAFRED STRABO : A GARDENER OF THE "DARK" AGES. 133 
WALAFRED STRABO : 
A GARDENER OF THE " DARK " AGES. 
By H. E. Luxmoore, M.A. 
How far the history of gardening interests the members of R.H.S. 
I do not know, but I am encouraged to offer the following abstract of 
a rare Latin poem by Walafred Strabo, dated about 800 a.d., when 
the great Karl was at the height of his power. Its appeal is human 
as well as technical, and may help to modify our supercilious epithet 
for the " Dark " Ages. 
In Lower Alsace is a place called Weissenburg. In the year 1870 
it was the scene of a battle in which the then Crown Prince of Germany 
defeated General Douay on August 4. Twelve centuries before, a 
Benedictine Abbey had been founded there, and was already 200 
years old when the monk Walafred Strabo took to gardening. As 
simple and perhaps as tedious, but certainly as loyal and industrious 
as most College Fellows or Cathedral Canons of any later day, he 
carried on the learning and the educational work of the great Alcuin, 
and he has left us the life of his favourite saint Blathmac of Iona, 
the vision of Wettin, and the praise and records of the Empress 
Judith and her great son Karl, all written in hexameters as good as 
or better than many which pass beneath or from the pen of the average 
schoolmaster of the present day. All these have been finely redacted 
and printed by the Teutonic industry of the unbafHed Dummler in 
his great collection of the Latin Carolingian poets ; and now and 
again for some chance reader there flashes back across eleven centuries 
a scene as real as Virgil's picture of the old Corycian gardener in 
Georgic IV. For there lies behind the monastery, in one of its outer 
courts before the gate, a bit of ground laboriously tilled and cared 
for — the delight, the pride, and the vexation of one of the most learned 
of the brothers. Good he is at his breviary no doubt ; with his 
classics he is saturated. Ovid and Lucan he has read, but Virgil is 
his delight, and his phrasing and expressions are redolent of iEneids 
and even more of Georgics and Eclogues. And he is loyal and 
affectionate too, as most men are that care for gardening. There 
is no trace in him of the spite that deforms the Spanish cloister for 
Robert Browning, or the pettiness and evil that gave Abbot Samson 
so much ado at Bury St. Edmunds. In one matter indeed has he 
shown a more than modern wisdom. Stooping is the worst thing for 
the ageing gardener, and how can one escape the backache except 
by raising the beds ? Accordingly a border of stout squared logs sur- 
rounds the beds, and within these the soil is piled to a convenient height.* 
* " Areola et lignis, ne diffluat, obsita quadris 
altius a piano modicum resupina levatur." 
