A New Garden List from a Small Book at the Cloisters.

We had the opportunity to visit New York this January. Michael has a piece in the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space  Oddity, and he so very much wanted to see the whole exhibition that we ground our teeth, sold plasma, and otherwise simplified our lives to bare bones in order to scrape together the fundage for a visit.

Well, I might be exaggerating about the selling plasma bit, but it felt like that might be a choice, because the budget got chopped hard.

I have always wanted to see the Cloister’s gardens, but it never felt like it was something that I should insist upon a trip to New York to see, and at first, I was so disappointed by the fact that when my opportunity to visit the gardens came, it was in muthaforkin January. But I shook myself out of my sorrow and decided to do the best I could with what I had available, for I may never be in  New York again.

The gardens were sleeping, of course, and the specific garden I most wanted to see looked like this:

A bare quince and barely living bed at Bonnefont Garden in the Cloisters

It was quite cold out, and I’d left my jacket with the coat check, so I could not be out nearly as long as I wanted. I got pictures of all the plants still happy in the beds and went into the building.

And that is where I met one of the Cloisters’ newest acquisitions: Book of Flower Studies by The Master of Claude of France. I stood there and wept, overwhelmed by how lovely it was and by how perfectly it encapsulated all my most favorite interests. I could hear M laugh gently as he noted my tears, and he took a picture of me crying before it: he says that this tenderness in me is part of why he loves me. It was an intimate moment before an intimate book.

Of course, I must be who I am, and so I compiled a list of the plants therein as ingestible plants suitable for the Renaissance garden. The list is limited by the subject matter of the book–flowers–and my inclination to list only those plants I know you can ingest. Any plant in a medieval or Renaissance garden had some use, but I’m not going to advise planting a flower unless I’ve a certainty that it’s considered modernly safe as a food or herbal tea.

Edibles:

Apothecary Rose
Blackberry*
Borage
Calendula
Chicory
Dandelion
Fava Bean
Grapes
Heartsease (modern name: Johnny Jump Up, Wild Pansy)
Hazelnut
Mullein
Saffron
Scottish Thistle
Sweet Violet
White Rose of York
Wild Pea
Wild Strawberry

*I question the identity of this; I’m not enough a botanist to know why this was identified as a blackberry rather than a raspberry, nor do I have access to any supplemental material the museum may have used to identify it. I’m just noting that it looks more like a raspberry to me. The entire book is online, here, and so review it yourself for your opinion, for your scribal inspiration, for your gardening inspiration, or just because it is a beautiful thing to see.

Other entries related to medieval and Renaissance plants for your garden:

Plant list from The Arte of Gardening
A kitchen garden by Leonhart Fuchs
A list of edibles pictured in Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta.
In which the historical place of rhubarb is discussed.
A Gathering of information on two pre-1601 soft fruits, or, I bet you thought I’d given this up, eh?