Women Who Shaped Garden History
During the medieval period, roughly from the 5th to the 15th century, gardens were places of survival, healing, and contemplation. Women — especially nuns, abbesses, and noblewomen — were central to the preservation of botanical knowledge that might otherwise have been lost.
The fall of Rome disrupted the organized horticulture of the classical world, but gardening continued in monasteries, convents, and castle enclosures. The hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden, became a defining image of the medieval period: a walled space of herbs, flowers, and fruit trees, protected from the chaos outside. Women were among its most important keepers.
Convents maintained some of the most sophisticated gardens in medieval Europe. Nuns grew medicinal herbs, vegetables, and flowers for liturgical use. The convent garden was a site of practical botany: women learned to identify, cultivate, dry, and prepare plants for healing. This knowledge was recorded in herbals and medical texts, though authorship was not always credited to the women who did the work.
The most famous exception is Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), the German abbess who wrote extensively about the medicinal uses of plants. Her works Physica and Causae et Curae cataloged hundreds of herbs, trees, and stones, making her one of the most important botanical writers of the Middle Ages. Her garden at the convent of Rupertsberg was both a working pharmacy and a place of spiritual reflection.
Noblewomen managed the gardens of castles and manors as part of their broader household responsibilities. These gardens supplied herbs for cooking and medicine, flowers for strewing on floors and scenting rooms, and vegetables for the table. The lady of the house often had detailed knowledge of which plants treated which ailments — knowledge that was passed from mother to daughter and rarely written down.
Medieval romances and illuminated manuscripts depict women in gardens constantly: reading, weaving, gathering flowers, and conversing. The garden was one of the few outdoor spaces where women of rank had freedom of movement, and it became symbolically associated with femininity, fertility, and the Virgin Mary.
The medieval herbal tradition drew on classical sources (Dioscorides, Galen, Pliny) but was kept alive in practice largely by women. The Anglo-Saxon Leechbook of Bald and similar texts record remedies that were likely developed and tested by female healers. As the medieval period progressed, however, women's herbal knowledge increasingly came under suspicion. The association of women, plants, and healing with witchcraft would have devastating consequences in the early modern period.