Create your green space with medieval inspiration
Leafing through the ornaments of prayer books—these lavish testimonials dating back to the Middle Ages—we find ourselves dreaming of fragrant seats, of a ‘housekeeper’ to feed the family, of a place where simple medicinal plants suffice to cure us. Even if your garden is small and by no means historic, you don’t need a lot of space to create enchanting settings, with the heavenly garden and its virgin plants, the garden of love, the courtyard and its beautiful flowering lawn, or even a carpet of thousand flowers.
Garden: lavender, a legendary fragrance
Without forgetting the wild corner, let us remember the “absurd pastures”, where regional decrees and customs allowed the poor to graze a donkey, goat, cow or sheep on private land, after the harvest. This right was accompanied by the possibility of picking and harvesting edible herbs.
Let the savages come
If you leave a corner for wild grasses, as in ‘pastures’, all that remains is to take those leaves and flowers that have been part of the diet of our ancestors since the dawn of time. Picking in your garden is a source of endless fun.
It is an enthusiastic, exhilarating and exciting hobby, and a real treasure hunt where passion, beauty, humility, contentment, extravagance, taste and amazement mix and mingle. Indiscriminately, some lovely and kind names that sow and reseed themselves, thanks to the wind and the birds: primrose, nettle, wild garlic, hogweed, peppermint, sorrel, plantain, burning, dandelion, sweet tooth (wild lettuce), ivy ground, borage, yarrow, wormwood, cornflower, chives, lemon balm, lungwort, meadowsweet, tansy …
We never repeat too much: just harvest what you know for sure. The slightest hesitation, which is not!
Home is a vegetable garden!
The vegetable garden was often surrounded by fences made of natural materials. Dead wood, living wood… They were there to stop cattle from destroying vegetable beds and to besiege the bocage plots. Now, they represent our individuality and avoid our roaming pets.
To become an integral part of the garden, there is nothing prettier and more rustic than a fence of chestnut or woven hazelnut. Sow and grow cabbage, beets, onions, carrots and some vegetables cultivated in the Middle Ages.
scented seat
All nature lovers love to sit on the grass, but why not make a green bench, like in the Middle Ages, where people sat to chat or embroider?
You need planks of wood, garden soil, compost, sand, and hardy mulching creeping plants, such as woolly thyme (Thymus lanuginosus) for sun, or song mint (Mentha pulegium) for partial shade.
Make a formwork of the desired height and seat depth. Choosing the right place, so that it is functional, practical and, above all, elegant. Put it down, and push it down a bit. Fill it with compost-enriched garden soil up to half an inch from the rim. Put a good layer of sand on the ground, about 20 cm, to drain, especially for thyme. Claw for mixing sand and earth. They are sown at the rate of one bucket every 20 cm in staggered rows. Wait a good year for the plants to be well established to use them as a seat.
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Finally, a brief overview…
Heavenly garden I made it possible to pick the flowers that decorate the church. For this massif dedicated to the Virgin, he adopted Madonna’s lilies and roses.
It is up to you to find what it stands for love garden…each with their own imagination.
to reset herbal Garden, Nothing has changed, or nearly, since the Middle Ages, when plants were the staple of medieval medicine.
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