from Medieval Academy News

The Medieval Garden
by Vickie Ziegler

The location of Penn State’s medieval garden—almost within the shadow of Beaver Stadium—is almost as unlikely as the way the garden came into being in the first place. Campus visitors, drawn by both the color of the Trial Gardens in the summer and the odd-looking series of gardens with various types of wattle fencing, raised beds, wellheads, stone walls, and rose arbors, come in a steady flow. High school students from the Governor’s School in Agriculture make their own herbals, while a local herbal study group harvests some of the more rampant medicinals and runs educational programs in exchange. At a university that is deservedly well-known for its strengths in agriculture and the applied sciences, the garden makes a permanent statement about the study of the Middle Ages, to faculty and students as well as to the general public.

The AT&T Medieval Garden at Penn State represents a fortunate convergence of expertise, interest, and financing, as well as long-standing ties of the Center for Medieval Studies with the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State. Response to it from other medievalists has convinced me that there is plenty of interest in mounting similar projects at other universities. For that reason, a brief history of how it came about may be useful.

When we mounted our conference and fair on the medieval landscape in 1999, our third involving Agriculture, we approached colleagues in Horticulture about the possibility of having a medieval garden at the fair. Horticulture had just appointed a restoration landscape architect, Martin McGann, to teach in its landscaping contracting program. Prof. McGann, who had previously worked in historic properties in New York’s lower Hudson Valley and at the New York Botanical Garden, recreated a medieval garden for the fair and suggested afterwards that we try to find funding to make it permanent. He offered to contribute his own time to the design and planting and the labor of his landscaping contracting classes, who would use the project as a learning and service project.

AT&T, which has a contract for phone service with Penn State, had been funding Center projects for five years; the Center approached our AT&T liaison, Lynne Schenden, with the project. Ms. Schenden, whose enthusiasm for the Center and its work have contributed a great deal to our mission, was able to convince her superior that this project was worth the $15,000 we asked for supplies and plants. A key element in the positive decision was the location of the garden, which is very near the football stadium on a main approach road to the campus. Thanks to the generosity of the director of the PSU Horticultural Trial Gardens, Prof. Robert Berghage, we were given a piece of wonderful real estate for the project, which has been crucial to its success.

The garden consists of three major parts. The first is a kitchen and physic garden, which groups by usage plants needed by medieval households. The medicinal section includes everything from poisonous plants to rose bushes, such as the Rosa Canina and Rosa Mundi, a dyeing section, and a fragrance bed. The vegetables are those commonly used in the Middle Ages, such as leeks, onions, cabbage, and many pottage plants. A stone well in the middle of the raised beds and wattle fences recognizes AT&T.

The second part, the pleasure ground, consists of a combination of flowering plants as well as some small fruits. The meadow, in the middle of which is a bench, is full of hollyhocks, wild strawberries, English daisies, sweet William, and other flowers. A more decorative type of wattle fencing, appropriate to the more elegant nature of this garden, combines with hawthorn trees to form an enclosure on three sides. The fourth side is bounded by beds containing medieval flowers, including calendula and columbine, as well as the daisies.

The third part, the enclosed aristocrat’s garden, went in this spring. A grape arbor made of saplings links it to the kitchen garden. The formal garden is contained on three sides with wood fencing and a stone wall. There is a raised turf bench, flowering beds with period plants, as well as a bed with an apple tree and strawberries beneath it. Much of the plant material in this garden was selected because of its religious or romantic symbolism. At the entrance to this section and the entire garden are a medieval cider and a Lady apple tree.

Two more installations are planned outside the garden: a grove of medieval fruit trees and an exhibit of medieval field crops, which we believe will be the only one in North America. Other plans include the introduction of an increased number of rare medieval plants into the garden.

For us, the garden has been an unqualified success. It gives on-going public recognition to the Center, it keeps the Middle Ages in a very visible place on campus, and it is heavily visited and used. Classes at Penn State go there, but we also find that school groups are making tours. The Pennsylvania Governor’s School uses it, as do local herb classes.

Editor’s note: Vickie Ziegler is director of the Penn State Center for Medieval Studies.