Among my most interesting finds in exploring old herbals and horticultural books is Hortulus by a monk named Walahfrid Strabo. His Latin moniker meant something like :the squint eyed" and he only lived to be 40. Most likely, he was a bookish and frail gardener and herbalist, who composed his work somewhere around 840 AD. Yes, that is a LONG time ago! What makes his writing so very unique is that he wrote everything in poetry. After the fall of Rome, the knowledge of the ancients was preserved by Catholic monks, mainly in the area we now know as Poland and Germany.... France and England were still fairly primitive frontiers comparatively. Brother Strabo's education at this time stands in amazing contrast to the rest of the world... he wrote a manual of herb gardening in the style of Homer! I'm going to post a page or two a day of his brief masterpiece, in English. I know y'all will enjoy this as much as I do! Hortulus means "little garden".
Is that not the most beautiful description of gardening you've ever read?!!!
"Winter, image of age, who like a great belly, eats up the whole year's sustenance and heartlessly swallows the fruits of our unstinted labor".... "Some plants we grow from seed, some from old stocks.. We try to bring back the youth they knew before."
Gosh, that touches my old hillbilly heart more than a Hank Williams song... even Townes Van Zandt never wrote anything so pretty!
Here is a brief bio I found online:
Walafrid Strabo (808-849 CE), is remembered in large part because he has given us one of the very few first-hand descriptions of an early medieval garden.
Walafrid was sent as a child to the monastery of Reichenau (at left), located on an island in Lake Constance, just north of the border between Germany and Italy. A remarkable student and writer, at the age of 18 Walafrid went to Fulda to study with renowned scholar Rabanus Maurus. From there, he was called to the court of King Louis, son of Charlemagne, to tutor 6-year-old Prince Charles. When Charles reached adulthood, Walafrid returned to Reichenau as its abbot.
Walafrid's Hortulus
Though he authored a number of scholarly works, Walafrid is best remembered for his Hortulus, or "Little Garden." Written in Latin verse, it begins with an explanation of how Walafrid gained his knowledge of gardening:
I myself learned this, not solely from opinion, common report, nor from searches of books and early writings, but by work and hands-on study to discover proven methods -- which considerably postponed my leisure at the end of each day!
Hortulus begins in early spring, when Walafrid is dismayed by rampant nettles "pushing up everywhere in my small plot." After hours of weeding, he carefully "surrounds the oblong beds with planks, slightly raised" to keep the rain from washing away the soil. He grows some plants from seed, some from cuttings. He hauls water in a bucket, pouring it "drop by drop, careful not to float the seeds away."
One part of his garden is beneath the edge of the roof where it gets little rain; another is deeply shaded by a high wall. But even so, "the garden traps no plant beneath its soil" and soon new growth pokes through.
What did his garden look like? Walafrid lists the plants he cultivates in his little garden, and perhaps -- we don't really know -- his list reflects the layout of his garden. A drawing in the Plan of St. Gall, a manuscript created at Reichenau at about the time that Walafrid arrived there as a boy, shows two monastery gardens. One, the physic garden, lies just beyond the door of the monastery infirmary. It is laid out in orderly rows of rectangular beds, each labeled in the manuscript so that we know what plants would be cultivated there.
Walafrid kept a notebook, or Vademecum, in which he documented his lifelong interest in the medicinal uses of plants. For every plant in his garden except the rose, he provided at least one therapeutic use, and it may be that his "little garden" was a physic garden, laid out along the same lines as the garden we see below in the Plan of St. Gall. Drawing upon that, we can imagine Walafrid's garden, taking into account the plants themselves, companion plant strategies, needs for sun or shade, and plant height.
One part of his garden is beneath the edge of the roof where it gets little rain; another is deeply shaded by a high wall. But even so, "the garden traps no plant beneath its soil" and soon new growth pokes through.
http://wyrtig.com/EarlyGardens/Continental/Walafrid/Hortulus.htm
No comments:
Post a Comment