In the Divine Comedy, Dante refers to God as the “eternal gardener,” implying a series of simple and repetitive tasks – though hopefully not overly onerous ones – for the patient deity as He cultivates spirituality, weeds away sin, and nurtures virtue, humility, and love. The metaphor is significant because, from the most humble of practical uses to the most sublime artistic representations, plants were intimately implicated in many facets of medieval life, and plant symbolism intersected all levels of the medieval understanding of the place of humans in the cosmos.

Human history, as understood by the medieval worldview, is inherently associated with the vegetal world. The human race first entered the world in a garden, and almost immediately ruined everything through the transgression at the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The world will end with the tribulations of a star called “Wormwood” according to Revelation, and the tree of life open to humankind once again. Such a theater for human history was recreated in the medieval cloister, where monks and nuns sought to carve off from the chaos of human affairs a tidy microcosmic garden in which divine order could be meditated upon without distraction. People in the Middle Ages wore plants, they ate them, they built their houses out of them, they healed with them, they poisoned with them. They made wine and bread from plants and called those the “blood” and “body” of Christ; they venerated the very “tree” upon which Christ was crucified almost as though a divinity itself. As Deirdre Larkin comments, “There is no aspect of medieval life – artistic, literary, social historic, economical, religious or scientific – that cannot be approached through plants and gardens.”

Academic interest in medieval gardens, and in the role of plants in medieval life and culture, has blossomed over the past four decades, fueled by a variety of impulses. Perhaps most obvious is the resurgence of interest in herbal medicine in our own culture, a resurgence resulting in part from a frustration with (what is sometimes perceived as) a distant, over-technologized medical culture too willing to rely on pharmaceutical treatments. Proponents of alternative medicine (such as holistic or natural medicines) view human well-being as an equilibrium of biological, psychological, spiritual, and social forces, and have found inspiration in the general principles of many premodern medical systems (this was the case in 1998, for example, on the occasion of the nine-hundredth anniversary of Hildegard of Bingen’s birth).