[Sca-cooks] I finally got some land to garden on..

[Stephen Bloch]

>..but i've never gardened before.
>
>I'll have on the order of up to half an acre to build a garden on and
>the ability to have a mulch pile (but that takes a while to "pay off"
>as it were).  It is located in SouthWestern, PA and is mostly shaded.
>I don't want ornamental, i'm more focused towards a theme of "things I
>can eat".
>
>Given those conditions, what kinds of vegetables/plants would y'all
>recommend I put in?  What advice would y'all have for the novice
>gardener?  What books/websites would y'all recommend for me to peruse
>for inspiration/information?

I would start with Sylvia Landesberg's _The Medieval Garden_, Thames 
& Hudson pub., ISBN 0-500-01691-7 (I don't see a copyright date; I 
think it's in the 1980's).  I wrote a review of it for Tournaments 
Illuminated a few years ago.  It discusses several different 
categories of medieval gardens, of which it sounds like you'd want an 
"herber", a small, enclosed garden of herbs and vegetables (albeit 
with, perhaps, some "leisure" features as well).  Landesberg also 
discusses what fruits and vegetables would be in a medieval garden, 
how it would have been laid out, crop rotation cycles, etc.  She has 
designed a good number of medieval gardens at various historic sites 
around Great Britain, and includes a chapter discussing how she did 
each one, as well as a chapter on designing your own medieval garden.

Some other sources:
Tania Bayard's _Sweet Herbs and Sundry Flowers: Medieval Gardens and 
the Gardens of the Cloisters_, Metropolitan Museum of Art 1985, ISBN 
0-87099-422-0 or 0-87923-593-4.  Includes about 15 pages on "the uses 
of herbs in the Middle Ages", then a chapter on each of the several 
reconstructed cloister gardens at The Cloisters (the medieval annex 
building of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York).  Not a lot 
of detail on each plant, just tables of what plants are in which 
garden and what "theme" they chose for each garden.

Margaret B. Freeman's _Herbs for the Medieval Household_, 
Metropolitan Museum of Art 1947 (2nd ed. 1997), ISBN 0-87099-776-9. 
Lists about a hundred herb and spice plants, with a woodcut and a few 
paragraphs on citations and uses in the Middle Ages for each.

Michel Botineau's _Les Plantes du Jardin Medieval_, Edition Eveil 
Nature 2001, ISBN 2-84000-034-2.
(Checking the Web site, I see a copyright date of 2003 and ISBN 
2-7011-3785-3; this may be a new edition, or may simply reflect the 
publisher being bought out by Editions Belin.)  I don't think there's 
an English-language edition; we picked this up at a museum shop in 
France.  It lists hundreds of plant species (herbs, spices, fruits, 
vegetables, etc.), with (for each) a picture, French common names, 
botanical name, at least one primary-source citation for its use in 
medieval Europe, and a few paragraphs about how it was used in the 
Middle Ages.

-- 
                                     John Elys
          (the artist formerly known as mar-Joshua ibn-Eleazar ha-Shalib)
                                 mka Stephen Bloch
                                 sbloch at adelphi.edu