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                                               Intro Mary Garden

Paradise of Our Lady

John S. Stokes Jr.

Queen of All Hearts

     .

       V.M.S. Hanell Virgin of the Annunciation, Woods Hole


     In medieval times small enclosed flower gardens were known as
"Paradises".  In art, paintings of the Madonna and Child in such
gardens, surrounded by symbolical flowers, were known as "Mary
Gardens".

     At the Garden of Our Lady, St Joseph's Church, Woods Hole on
Cape Cod - the mother garden of the present day Mary Garden
movemement - its founder, Frances Crane Lillie, introduced into
the garden itself the concept of a figure of Our Lady surrounded
by symbolical flowers.

     St. Athanasius states that the Mass and Church festivals
enable us for the moment to dissolve the barriers between our life
on earth and the life of heaven.  After Mass, as we enter the Woods
Hole Paradise of Our Lady beside the church Angelus Tower across
the street, we find that its plants and flowers, too, bring heaven
to earth in a special way.

     We are alerted to this by a bronze plaque beside the Tower
door reproducing the inscriptions of the two Angelus bells:

     "I will teach you of life and of life eternal", and

     "Thanks be to God."

     As we approach the garden at the end of a grassy plot, we see
a plant list and planting plan posted in an attractive shelter to
the left - giving the old religious names of the plants from the
medieval countrysides, as found through extensive research,
together with their present-day common and botanical names.

     Then as we enter the beds themselves, plant markers with the
religious names enable us to re-discover intuitively for each
plant variety the shape and color from which its religious
symbolism was originally derived by the eyes of faith.

     In this way the garden plants are resplendent for us as: Our
Lady by the Gate, Where God has Walked, Sweet Mary, Our Lady's
Praises, Eyes of Mary, Our Lady's Mantle, Virgin Flower, Madonna
Lily, and Mary's Rose.
 
     Other flowers bring us to the eternal Bethlehem and
Nazareth: Our Lady's Bedstraw, Our Lady's Cushion, Mary's Slipper,
Our Lady's Glove, Our Lady s Mint, Our Lady's Thimble, Madonna's
Pins, Virgin Mary's Candle.

     Beholding Our Lady's Tears, we place ourselves at the foot of
the Cross with Mary, and then re-ascend to contemplation of heaven
through Assumption Lily, Ladder to Heaven, Mary's Gold, Trinity,
and Lady Never-Fade.

     As a holy place, sacramentally blest by bishop and priest,
the Garden of Our Lady is doubly a foretaste of Paradise.  The
immaculateness, beauty and symbolism of the flowers raise our
thoughts to heaven; and as we open ourselves to them, the grace,
light and wisdom focused for us by them, as blest religious
objects, prepare us to rise mystically in contemplation of the
treasuries and storehouses of the heavenly Paradise itself.

     Turning now to the central sculpted garden figure of Our
Lady, depicted as she might have been at the moment of the
Annunciation, we join in the choir of heavenly praises which, as
St. Louis de Montfort - nurtured himself in the Spiritual Paradise
of Mary - tells us, repeat the salutation of the Angel to Mary
millions of times each day: "Hail, full of grace".

     The flowers answer back, at it were, proclaiming Mary's
purity, humility, openness to God, obedience and fruitfulness in
the Spirit, as she responds, "Be it done to me according to thy
word."

     In thought we turn to the words of "The New Jerusalem"
(16O1):

          Thy gardens and thy pleasant walks
            Continually are green.
          There grow such sweet and pleasant flowers
            As nowhere else are seen.

          There trees for evermore bear fruit
            And evermore do spring;
          There evermore the angels sit,
            And evermore do sing.

          Our Lady sings Magnificat
            With tones surpassing sweet,
          And all the virgins bear their part
          Stitting about her feet.

     We recall that at Guadalupe, in 1531, the radiant
translucence of the cacti and shrubs just prior to Our Lady's
first appearance there, led Juan Diego to wonder if he had come
upon the terrestrial paradise itself.

     And when Mary appeared at La Salette in 1846, she was drawn
down, as it were, by what the shepherd children in their own words
described as a "paradise" made of wild flowers they had gathered
as they rested.

     In a border bed of the garden, a small figure of St. Dorothy,
early patron saint of gardening, reminds us that after her
martyrdom she immediately sent an angelic messenger to her
executioners with a basket of flowers and fruits from the heavenly
paradise, tauntingly requested by them before they put her to
death.

     "As above, so below".  Every object on earth manifests the
resplendence of its glorious heavenly counterpart.

     Elevated to this vision by the garden and flowers, we are
beautifully sustained in the Peace of Christ as we go forth from
Mass, by way of the garden, to the world.

     The Garden of Our Lady is also a New Paradise of Eden from
which we proceed, with the divine light, grace, wisdom and power
mediated by Mary, the New Eve, to renew the face of the earth.

     The resplendence of the garden assists us in becoming a light
in the world, to illuminate the sure movement of souls and nations
towards salvation, the earthly peaceable kingdom and heaven.  The
power of this vision gives us the strength to reach out to others
in love, peace, justice and mercy as we walk midst the worldly
morass of alienation, want, civil strife and war.

     Instructed by the blest garden and flowers that all places
and objects of our daily lives can likewise be sacramentally blest
and illuminatively perceived, we are now moved to turn everywhere
for channels of grace, resplendence and power - whereby, through
Mary's mediation, we and all things may be lifted up in Christ to
meet the descending Heavenly Jerusalem.  "Thy kingdom come on
earth as it is in heaven."

     Envisaging gardens and flowers and all the places and objects
of our lives as windows of heaven and channels of the Spirit, we
go forth from Mass in the peace of Christ so our tasks of life
will be carried out with quickened faith, hope and love.

          "We wish you unto daily prayer and the fruition of the
          Heavenly Paradise; craving of the omnipotent God, the
          guider of that gorgeous garden, that he vouchsafe to
          grant unto you the sweet savor of his chief fragrant
          flowers; and that it be his comfort to cleave unto you,
          his mercy to keep you, and his grace to guide you now
          and evermore."

                           - Blessing from the dedication of a
                             sixteenth century English garden book

Reprinted with permission