The Virgin in the Garden, or Why Flowers Make Better Prayers

On the Naturalness of Symbols and the Bidding of Beads

Flowers are some of the most familiar and best-loved symbols of the Virgin Mary. While it may take some effort to see the Virgin in such architectural images as the Ark of the Covenant, the Tower of David or the Temple of Solomon, not to mention such Old Testament typologies as Moses' Burning Bush, Gideon's Fleece, the Closed Door of Ezekiel, or Daniel's Mountain "cut without hands," the rose, the lily, and the violet need little introduction.¹ As one twelfth-century preacher put it: "These are [the flowers] with whose sweet perfume you filled the house of God, O Mary: the violet of humility, the lily of chastity, and the rose of love."² In their beauty and simplicity, the flowers signify Mary's virtues, her virginity, fertility, purity and piety. They may also, however, signify Mary herself. She is the mystic rose (rosa mistica) of the Loretan litany, the lily among thorns (lilium inter spinas) of the Song of Songs (Song 2:2). She is the rose "of swych vertu" because it was she—in the words of one of the most beautiful late medieval carols—"that bare Jesu."³

Flowers belong to the Virgin Mary as to no other saint. When the bridegroom of the Song of Songs says, "I am come into my garden" (Song 5:1), almost all of the flowers that he would find there would, by the later Middle Ages at least, have been identifiably hers: alchemilla was "Mary's mantle," Canterbury bells or foxglove was "Mary's gloves," lungwort was "Mary's milk-wort," rosemary was "Mary's tree," narcissus (alias daffodil) was "Mary's lily," ragwort was "Mary's bedstraw," polygonatum or Solomon's seal was "Mary's seal," toadflax was "Mary's flax," and ageratum was, quite simply, "Mary's flower." The list could easily go on, and, indeed, over the centuries it has only continued to grow. Meadowsweet is "Our Lady's Girdle"; harebell is "Our Lady's Thimble"; bird's-foot trefoil is "Our Lady's Slipper"; cowslip is "Our Lady's Keys."⁴ One current list, available on-line at Mary Gardens HomePage, contains over 600 plant and flower names associated with the devotion to Mary, including, of course, the Calendula officinalis or "Marygold."⁵ From this perspective, it seems almost natural, not to say unremarkable, that the most famous Marian prayer—the rosary—should be named after a flower or, rather, a garden of flowers (rosarium), and that prayer-books containing prayers to Mary should be illustrated with flowers, as, for example, in the opening from a late fifteenth-century Dutch book of hours in the Regenstein Collection at the University of Chicago shown here. On the left, Mary holding the Child appears as the Woman of Apocalypse 12, clothed in the sun with the moon at her feet and haloed with stars. A celestial vision, she and the child appear through a window itself lavishly ornamented with a frame of leaves, flowers, acorns, and what appear to be thistles, perhaps the carduus marianus or milk-thistle, so-called for the milky-white spots on its leaves. On the right, the initial "O" of the prayer frames a single perfect rose—at once an ornament to the page and a symbol of the woman to whom the prayer is addressed.

But is it? Natural, I mean. It is culturally expected, to be sure, that pictures of Mary should be ornamented with flowers. But why? More prosaically, is culture sufficient to explain why a string of beads (the other meaning of the word "rosarium") should be named after a flower or why flowers should be, in Marian devotion, at least, so inextricably linked...