© Janet Davis

Unlike other types of gardens that have evolved to meet modern lifestyles and notions, classic herb gardens have endured in much the same way for almost two thousand years, ever since the monastic gardens of early Christian times. But herbs were used even earlier, by the Assyrians and Egyptians, well before 2000 B.C. It's known, for example, that chamomile was a principal ingredient in the embalming oil used to mummify the Egyptian King Rameses II at his death in 1224 B.C. The first Chinese herbal, written around 1000 B.C., was based on the teachings of the Yellow Emperor, Huang Di,, who had reigned in 2600 B.C. And in his De Materia Medica, the 1st Century Greek physican Dioscorides listed 600 herbs, many of which continue to be used medicinally today.

In 4th century Egypt, the first Christian monks subsisted on plants they grew inside walled gardens. And in 540 A.D in Italy, notes Deni Brown in her book, Encyclopedia of Herbs and Their Uses (Reader's Digest Press, 1995), St. Benedict, founder of the Benedictine order, "specified in the Regula Monachorum -- the foundation of monastic rule to this day -- that vegetables, fruit, grapes, herbs, dye plants, and aromatics for incense should be grown."

Plants with pharmacalogical properties used by medieval apothecaries were known as "officinals", and their botanical names appended with the epithet "officinalis". Common sage or Salvia officinalis (from the Latin salvus, meaning "safe and well") was used to treat a variety of ailments; soapwort, Saponaria officinalis, whose leaves and roots lather in water, was used as a cleansing agent; and hyssop, Hyssopus officinalis, a herb mentioned in the Old Testament, was administered for bronchial complaints.

But medieval herbalism occasioned its share of metaphysical voodoo, as evidenced by The Doctrine of Signatures. This 16th century work held that the physical traits of certain herbs held a clue to the ailments they would cure. So the lung-shaped, white markings on the leaves of lungwort, Pulmonaria officinalis, promised that the plant would cure lung problems while the liver-shaped leaves of Hepatica indicated its use for liver ailments.

In the early 1500s, starting with the Orto Botanico at the University of Padua in Italy, "physic" gardens were developed and planted with herbs to aid in the teaching of botany and medicine. A century-and-a-half later, physic gardens were commonplace at European universities and also housed the new plant species collected in Asian and the New World by botanical explorers.

16th Century England saw the intricate geometry of Elizabethan knot gardens make clever use of clipped aromatic herbs like germander, lavender, rosemary and wormwood. And with the ornately formal, boxwood-enclosed parterres of 17th Century France, the ornamental herb garden took its place alongside the decorative kitchen potager.

But what about modern herb gardens? If today's gardeners buy their name-brand drugs from the corner pharmacy and their natural remedies at the health food store, why the desire to evoke the monastery cloister garden with its protective walls, bisecting paths, geometric beds and ancient medicinal herbs?

In his book Why We Garden (Henry Holt, 1994), author Jim Nollman offers this explanation in answer. "Most contemporary herb gardens exist as remedy museums and not as remedy gardens.... This is a symbolic garden, a semantic garden, a historical garden. A walk through it often evokes images of the Middle Ages: a time when medical technology referred primarily to mortars and pestles; when housewives and monks and prefeminist 'witches' browsed the garden paths on any bright sunny morning gathering dewy sheaves of aromatic plants, pinching a leaf here, a flower bud there, searching out the raw material for daily potions, decoctions, elixirs, and infusions."

In gardening, as in fashion, everything old is eventually new again.

Adapted from an article that appeared originally in Toronto Gardens

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