Monastery garden in bloom

As Easter arrives, we remember that Lent has been heralding the arrival of Spring, for those in northern hemisphere. The word “Lent” itself carries that etymological meaning from Germanic languages, its roots also discerned in the English word “length” - we experience the lengthening of daylight and the abbreviation of the darkness of night. As we celebrate the Risen Lord, these seasonal connotations and experiences remind us of faith and theology. A seasonal “resurrection” seems to be echoed as well in the new life arising from the ground, in the regrowth emergent from the earth. And if our architecture and our art are intended to remind us of our faith, here too do our landscape, our gardens, our grounds. 

 

 

Newly-mown Cross Hill, prepared for the Stations of the Cross

The monastery grounds, perhaps the most uniquely beautiful of the attributes that bless this community, have again come to life, a process accelerated by the rain and the expanding insistence of the daylight. So too must the work expand to maintain all of this manicured acreage. Brother Joseph has been at work on Cross Hill, mowing the field in preparation for the annual Stations of the Cross. His work, as indeed the work of many hands, continues to prepare monastery garden, which anticipates an Easter Sunday egg-hunt offered to the faculty’s young children. The Buildings and Grounds staff of the School enters into its high season, even requiring additional outside help to complete all the tasks. In fact, there is so much to talk about here, our readers may anticipate a later article to fill in more detail – perhaps including factoids on quantities of mulch, fertilizer, hours of mowing. For now, we will leave that at “a lot.” 

 

 

The Holy Lawn aerated for spring

What this article means to offer is essentially a brief photographic essay, postcards from the season of Easter at the Abbey. And we may highlight the Church of St. Gregory the Great, and include reference to Dom Hilary Martin, the “superb landscape architect,” as Brother Joseph Byron notes, who was behind much of the master plan for the landscape here, conceived in conjunction with the Belluschi buildings of the upper campus.

 

 

Heath around the abbey church

As the church building is to serve as the visual focus of whole campus, the grounds provide it with its frame. Br. Joseph points out that Dom Hilary envisioned heath and heather as the principal vegetation there, intended to echo back to this monastery’s inheritance from Fort Augustus monastery in Scotland. While much of those plantings were not able to survive, we still see similar vegetation around the church. In front of the church lies “The Holy Lawn,” called such without any particular sacramental validity, but as it is “set apart,” not to be traversed under any circumstances - exceptions: small children, school graduations, and unwitting guests. It has recently undergone spring preparation, the dethatching and aeration revealing lines of striation that will soon disappear into thick and frequently-mown grass. 

 

 

European Beech

Just south of the church one encounters two impressive European Beech trees, one that dominates the space. The trees were planted at the time of the construction of the church, and have grown alongside the liturgical life happening inside. The largest has filled in massively, expanding to define the entire area between the church and the principal monastery entrance by the Linenfold Room. The ground there recently required an entire outside landscape crew to tend to it after being covered with a myriad of leaves, and mulch was added to keep down the growth otherwise difficult to access beneath its spreading branches. There are several other European Beeches on campus. One finds adjacent to Saint Benet’s dorm a tree planted about the time of its construction. Brother Joseph notes that there also had once been a beech hedge near the Manor House, pollarded to keep it under control, a technique similar to that used on the Linden trees in front of the dining hall. When it was decided to remove that hedge, some of the trees were transplanted. One of the results of that decision can be seen occupying much of the space between the Burden Classroom Building and the gymnasium. 

 

 

Gate of the Monastery Garden

The cherry trees now in bloom have these past weeks set ablaze the “Monastery Garden” (somewhat of a restrictive misnomer, if one considers the hundreds of acres we inhabit here the true “monastery garden”). Enclosed behind the monastery one finds this cloistered garden, the conception of Dom Peter Sidler, and was shaped in the mid-1980's. Brother Joseph notes that prior its construction, one found there little more than “a rickety picnic table, just off the parking lot behind the dining hall.” Sidler’s concept enclosed and set off the area, transforming it into a cloister, more appropriate to the space directly adjacent to the monastery’s calefactory and refectory. Dom Damian Kearney’s hand may also be seen in the plantings that bear the mark of his years of “labora” in the gardens located there as elsewhere on the grounds. His work is commemorated in the plaza more recently created behind the Burden building and the new Science Building.

 

 

Fountain designed and created by Dom Peter Sidler

As we inhabit and enjoy the grounds of Portsmouth, we thus may come to be reminded of their creators and their Creator. And as we take up our own part in the preservation of this heritage, we are also perhaps reminded of this important lesson from Saint Paul: “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor. For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s field, God’s building.” (1 Corinthians 3)