St. Francis' Garden

The next article that Kristiana and I presented on was about the garden of St. Francis around the twelve and thirteen hundreds. In this time it was common for these Christian saints, who usually escaped the world to live secluded lives in the wilderness, to have small gardens along with their huts. Unfortunately hardly any records of Francis exist but what we do have are certain hagiographies, most notably from Thomas of Celano’s Remembrance. These hagiographies are essentially a very accurate representation that allows us to interpret a clear depiction of gender roles, legal practices, economic behavior, monastic ideology, and local social customs.

What we do know about St. Francis however is that he aspired to be different than his fellow Christian saints. The typical monastic garden was very tidy with clear perimeters and its contents only served the purpose of medicine and food to survive. Francis’ garden however purposely had no nice ditch, fence, or wall to enclose it, but rather he let the garden grow free without restriction. He also made room in his garden for non-essential flowers that he found aesthetically pleasing as well as letting weeds to enter.

Thomas proposes possible explanations to Francis’ peculiar layout as a stand against the current shift in the monastic gardens. Given the religious nature of Francis, he believed that all of god’s creations were beautiful and he believed in no such thing as “weeds”. The other factor for not having a wall was that Francis was in fact taking a stand against the idea of privatization. The author describes that these rural gardens that have been common use around this time period, have now began changing towards privatization of the land. There was a change in the role of the land from self-sufficiency and happiness to profit maximization. Francis feared that this would destroy the things that he loved the most and used his garden as a way to shed light on this problem he saw.

In our time in Italy, I feel that we have encountered many examples that fit into this pattern of transition from goals of survival and leisure to profit. One especially being the many orange, lemon, and grape vineyards we have visited. I think especially of an orange and lemon garden we visited in Sorrento where what was once a plentiful and beautiful garden has shifted more towards mass production of these fruits. The fact of the matter is that today we live in a much different world than the world in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries where producing only what you need to get by on is no longer much of an option.     

-Hayden