What is a monastery garden?
Monastic gardens were typically designed as a rectangle broken into smaller rectilinear areas by straight paths, and there would be two distinct gardens: a physic garden and a kitchen garden. As the name suggests, the physic garden or herb garden grew medicinal plants and culinary herbs.
Why did monasteries have gardens?
Monastic gardens provided medicine and food for the monks and for the local community. Herbs were cultivated in the ‘physic garden’ composed of well-ordered rectangular beds, while orchards, fishponds and dovecotes ensured there would be food for all.
What herbs do monks use?
7 ‘magic potions’ grown by medieval monks
- The plant that looks like a human – Mandragora officinarum (mandrake)
- The aphrodisiac – Eryngium maritimum (sea holly)
- The cocktail flower – Artemisia absinthium (absinthe, absinthium, absinthe wormwood)
- The psychoactive plant – Hyoscyamus niger (henbane)
What were medieval gardens called?
A herber was a herb garden and pleasure garden. A Hortus Conclusus was an enclosed garden representing areligious allegory). A Pleasaunce was a large complex pleasure garden or park. The word paradise comes from a Persion word for a walled garden.
What is one thing the monks would grow in the cloister?
The vegetation would provide fruit, such as apples or pears, as well as manual labor for the monks as was required by the Rule of Saint Benedict.
Did peasants have gardens?
Main uses. Gardens were mainly in monasteries and manors, but were also developed by peasants.
What vegetables were eaten in medieval times?
While grains were the primary constituent of most meals, vegetables such as cabbage, chard, onions, garlic and carrots were common foodstuffs. Many of these were eaten daily by peasants and workers and were less prestigious than meat.
What can you grow in a medicinal herb garden?
Every medicinal garden should include chamomile, yarrow, lemon balm, echinacea and peppermint. These five basics are safe and effective for the vast majority of people when used as simple teas, poultices or salves.
What herbs did they use in the Middle Ages?
Headache and aching joints were treated with sweet-smelling herbs such as rose, lavender, sage, and hay. A mixture of henbane and hemlock was applied to aching joints. Coriander was used to reduce fever. Stomach pains and sickness were treated with wormwood, mint, and balm.
Where was food kept in a castle?
Generally, food storage is located in rooms in a castle or other fortified building because otherwise bandits and neighboring feudal lords would steal it and everyone in the victimized fiefdom would die. Grain storage is usually in a tower-like silo or other granary.
What was the purpose of the monastic garden?
Gardening was particularly important for medicinal use. For example, when the peel of the poppy stalk was ground and mixed with honey, it could be used as a plaster for wounds. Other herbs and plants were used for internal complications, such as a headache or stomachache.
Where did the idea of medicinal gardens come from?
The origin of monastic medicinal gardens comes from Benedict of Nursia, founder of the monestary of Monte Cassino in 529 AD who said, “Before all things, and above all things, special care must be taken of the sick.” These early monastic medieval gardens were typically limited to the plants indigenous to the local environment.
What kind of plants did the Benedictines grow?
Each of the rectangular beds is labelled with the name of a herb: sage, watercress, rue, cumin, iris, lovage, pennyroyal, fennel, climbing beans, pepperwort, costmary, Greek hay, rosemary, mint, lilium & rose. Benedictines lived on a largely vegetarian diet so so the kitchen garden was a key part of the monastery.
What kind of plants were used in monasteries?
Savin is one of the plants mentioned in another important surviving text from this period – The Capitulari de Villi s – [c770 -800] a list of regulations and rules for running of royal estates under Charlemagne. This lays down the trees, herbs and other plants that should be grown for food and physic.
