The Vatican’s medieval garden is now fully organic
The plot next to the Mater Ecclesiae monastery now follows principles of care for creation set out in Laudato Si’.
about 1 month ago
The Vatican’s historic medieval garden has been converted to a fully organic operation, marking a significant shift toward sustainable horticulture within the Holy See’s ancient grounds. 1
The garden, which dates back to the Middle Ages, has long been a symbol of the Vatican’s cultural and spiritual heritage. Recent efforts have focused on preserving its historic character while updating its agricultural practices. 1
All planting, soil management, and pest control methods have been replaced with certified organic techniques. This includes the use of natural fertilizers, compost, and biological pest control agents, eliminating synthetic chemicals from the garden’s ecosystem. 1
The organic transformation aims to enhance biodiversity, improve soil health, and provide a model of environmentally responsible stewardship for other historic sites. It also reflects the Vatican’s broader commitment to ecological responsibility. 1
How has Catholic stewardship shaped medieval garden practices?
Catholic stewardship shaped medieval garden practices by joining cultivation, conservation, prayer, healing, and community life. Medieval gardens—especially those attached to monasteries—were not understood merely as decorative spaces or economic assets. They were places where human work cooperated with God’s creation, served bodily needs, and directed the mind toward divine goodness.
The theological foundation was the biblical command to “till and keep” the garden. Pope Francis explains that “tilling” means cultivating and working the earth, while “keeping” means caring for, protecting, overseeing, and preserving it. Human beings may use the earth for legitimate needs, but they remain responsible for maintaining its fruitfulness for future generations.
This outlook gave medieval gardening a distinctive moral character. Land was not simply something to exploit for maximum yield. It was a divine gift entrusted to human care. Pope Benedict XVI similarly teaches that humanity is able to transform creation but cannot regard itself as its “absolute master”; stewardship means protecting creation, enjoying its fruits, cultivating it, and handing it on to future generations.
In practice, this encouraged a balanced approach:
The evidence available here does not provide a detailed catalogue of specific medieval techniques—such as crop rotation, irrigation systems, or particular planting layouts—but it does establish the principles that made such practices intelligible within Catholic culture.
The most direct influence was monasticism. Pope Francis identifies the Benedictine pattern of ora et labora—prayer and work—as a major Christian contribution to the meaning of labor. Saint Benedict’s monks combined prayer and spiritual reading with manual work, and this made labor a means of spiritual formation rather than merely an economic necessity.
Monastic gardens therefore embodied a rhythm in which:
The garden became an extension of monastic stability. Monks did not merely withdraw from the world; they transformed a portion of it through patient, ordered work. Pope Francis states that this interplay of recollection and labor encouraged a more respectful and sober relationship with the environment.
This helps explain why medieval monastic gardens often combined several purposes in one place. A single complex could include productive plots, orchards, medicinal plantings, enclosed spaces for quiet, and areas associated with religious symbolism. Such integration reflects the Catholic conviction that human life is not divided into completely separate “spiritual” and “material” spheres.
Catholic stewardship also encouraged the cultivation of plants for medicinal use. The sources connect care for creation with care for the human person. Pope Francis emphasizes that Christian service includes drawing near to those who suffer and promoting the integral healing of body, soul, and spirit.
He also cites the biblical wisdom that “the Lord created medicines out of the earth,” presenting the natural world as containing real goods that human intelligence and labor may responsibly discover and use.
Within this framework, the medieval medicinal garden was not simply a primitive pharmacy. It expressed several Catholic convictions:
Creation contains intelligible goods.
The natural world is ordered and meaningful, not merely chaotic matter.
Human reason has a legitimate role.
People may observe plants, learn their properties, cultivate them, and apply them for healing.
Knowledge carries responsibility.
Natural resources should be used for genuine human benefit rather than exhausted through greed.
Care for the body belongs to charity.
Cultivating remedies could be understood as part of serving the sick and vulnerable.
The medical and charitable work associated with monasteries thus gave gardens a practical social function. Their produce could support the religious community, travelers, the poor, and the sick.
Catholic stewardship did not mean leaving nature entirely untouched. The Christian image of the garden involves both cultivation and care. Pope Francis explicitly rejects the idea that ecological responsibility requires excluding human activity. He writes that an integral ecology must recognize the value of labor, since human beings were placed in the garden both to preserve it and to make it fruitful.
This principle helps distinguish Catholic stewardship from two opposite errors:
Medieval gardens represented a middle path. They were shaped by human hands—enclosed, planted, watered, pruned, and harvested—but ideally shaped according to the nature of the land and the needs of the community. Deborah Savage describes this Catholic-Thomistic approach as recognizing both a human right to use creation and a corresponding duty not to use it up, since created goods ultimately belong to God.
The garden thus became a model of ordered human creativity: nature was developed, but not treated as morally irrelevant or infinitely disposable.
Medieval Catholic gardens were also shaped by the conviction that creation reveals God. Pope Francis presents nature as a “magnificent book” through which God’s beauty and goodness can be perceived.
This contemplative dimension affected garden design and use. A garden could be:
The example given by Pope Francis concerning Saint Francis of Assisi is especially significant: Francis asked that part of the friary garden remain untouched so that wildflowers and herbs could grow and direct observers’ minds toward God.
This principle complicates any simplistic picture of medieval gardening as total control over nature. Stewardship included both cultivation and restraint. A faithful garden could contain ordered, useful plots while also preserving a space for spontaneous growth and the contemplation of non-utilitarian beauty.
Gardens served more than their owners. Catholic social teaching regards the environment as part of the common good—a shared responsibility of the human race—and rejects the belief that dominion grants unlimited permission to despoil nature.
Applied to medieval institutions, this principle helps explain why cultivated land was often connected with hospitality and service. Agricultural productivity could support:
Pope John Paul II states that natural resources must be used not only for immediate needs but also for future generations, since created goods are directed toward the good of all humanity.
A medieval garden shaped by this ethic was therefore not merely private leisure space. It could participate in a network of charity, subsistence, medicine, and hospitality.
Medieval gardening was also part of a broader cultural ecology. Pope Francis argues that responsible ecology includes preserving the historical, artistic, and cultural patrimony of particular places. Environmental care should respect local identity and allow culture to remain a living, participatory reality.
This perspective is relevant to medieval gardens because they were embedded in local patterns of land use, religious custom, architecture, and community life. Their forms were not simply technical arrangements of plants. They expressed a culture in which agriculture, liturgy, medicine, craftsmanship, and landscape were closely connected.
Christopher Thompson notes that Catholic reflection on agriculture and rural life has consistently appealed to the “normativity of nature”—the idea that created things possess an order that human practices should respect. He also observes that Catholic rural movements later associated with organic and local food drew upon Thomistic principles concerning creation and stewardship.
It would be inaccurate to claim that every medieval garden was environmentally sustainable in the modern sense. Medieval communities cleared forests, altered waterways, enclosed land, and pursued agricultural expansion. Nor did medieval Christians possess contemporary ecological science.
The stronger and more defensible claim is that Catholic theology supplied a moral and spiritual framework capable of guiding responsible cultivation. It taught that:
Catholic stewardship shaped medieval garden practices by making the garden a place of productive work, medicinal care, communal provision, spiritual discipline, contemplation, and ecological restraint. Monasticism provided the institutional setting through ora et labora; biblical theology supplied the command to “till and keep”; Thomistic thought affirmed the intelligibility and goodness of creation; and Christian charity directed the fruits of cultivation toward the sick, poor, community, and future generations.
The medieval garden was therefore neither untouched wilderness nor a purely commercial plantation. At its best, it was a visible expression of the Catholic understanding that human beings are custodians within creation, called to cultivate the earth while respecting its God-given order.