Carly Still had been working as a gardener in the Hudson Valley when she decided to move to the city 13 years ago. She happened onto a part-time position at the Met Cloisters, in Upper Manhattan, where she encountered many plants for the first time — ones with curious common names like skirret, weld and costmary — and others that she knew too well, or thought she did.
Among the familiar ones were several that she had removed whenever she came upon them in her old job. Stinging nettle (Urtica dioica), for example, is tricky to garden around in cultivated areas, as anyone who has accidentally grabbed a handful while weeding or brushed bare skin against it will attest.
She also recognized greater burdock (Arctium lappa), broadleaf plantain (Plantago major) and even some dandelions in the Bonnefont Cloister Herb Garden, one of three main gardens at the museum of medieval art that opened in 1938 as a branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
But maybe most surprising to find in a garden like this was mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), an invasive plant from Europe and northern Asia that is notoriously hard to eradicate.
At the Cloisters, she began to look at these plants in a new way.
Like the gentler botanical souls that dominate the garden’s plant list — including sage, lavender and rosemary, as well as roses, hellebores, Madonna lilies and so many more — they are essential elements of a diverse living collection, she realized, that complements the permanent collection of art and artifacts inside the museum.
Ms. Still, now 41 and the museum’s managing horticulturist, came to understand why the trickier types belong as much as the ones visiting gardeners are more likely to covet: Each represents an individual page in a kind of living history book that is the garden.
This is a teaching garden where every specimen “has a story to tell,” she said. “It is beyond plants just being beautiful.”
And before anyone panics: Each bed is diligently, expertly maintained to keep all the plants in check. And what does need pulling or deadheading is safely disposed of.
Plants With a Purpose
The herb garden’s palette is based on a ninth-century edict of the emperor Charlemagne, naming 89 species to be grown on his royal estates. It is augmented by species described in other historical texts, including one by the art historian Margaret B. Freeman, published by the Met in 1943, when she was curator at the Cloisters.
“What is an herb?” begins the introduction in Ms. Freeman’s “Herbs for the Mediaeval Household,” a beloved reference of Ms. Still’s. The question, the author recounts, was asked of Charlemagne by his teacher, the scholar Alcuin.
The emperor reportedly replied, “The friend of physicians and the praise of cooks.”
Herbs are surely all of that, and more. “They’re everything,” Ms. Still said. “An herb is a plant with a purpose — you just need to find it. It’s not just about eating or seasoning things.”
As for that mugwort: Gardeners, farmers and ecologists have called it many unprintable names, but it was once known as the mother of all herbs, with a role in women’s health and other medicinal uses. And, as its common name reveals, it was commonly used in brewing. It was a plant (a wort) to fill your cup (mug).
“It was mixed with many other flavoring agents in ales, before hops were introduced into the brewing practice,” Ms. Still said. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and costmary (Tanacetum balsamita), she added, “were all things that were being thrown into the pot, too.”
No, don’t try planting mugwort. (Although you may want to make an out-of-the-way space to cultivate stinging nettle, for the unforgettable soup its young shoots yield.) But by taking them all in, in this curated space — so many plants for your wish list, and a few best avoided — Ms. Still hopes visitors will come away with some of the feeling that fills her as she works in the garden.
She gets a glimpse into another time, she said: “How connected people were to plants — this deep devotion to a garden is something I find really beautiful, especially in our fast-paced environment. There is an element of hope in all of it.”
Plants for Eating and Crafting (and Love)
In the Bonnefont herb garden, plants are grouped in beds by their common historical purpose. A vegetable-and-salad bed includes little-grown skirret (Sium sisarum), an umbellifer yielding edible spring shoots and long-lasting white cut flowers. Its thickened, fingerlike white roots — its main crop — have a carrot-like flavor when cooked.
Salad burnet (Sanguisorba minor) is in there, too, “a cheerful little herb” Ms. Still highly recommends, with foliage that tastes like cucumber, delicious in salads or as a garnish.
There is a medicinal bed, one for household herbs and another for fibers and dyes, among the many themed groupings, which also include magic and ceremony, arts and crafts, and love.
Yes, love. One such herb is dittany of Crete (Origanum dictamnus), an edible, woolly textured oregano grown here in pots. Because heroics were required to harvest a bouquet of flowers from its inaccessible natural habitat on rocky crevices in Crete, where it is endemic, it was regarded as a love token. “Many a lover risked their life to collect this beautiful herb to charm their lover’s heart,” Ms. Still said.
There is no bed devoted to herbs suitable for edging the garden, but two she recommends are lady’s mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris) and santolina (Santolina chamaecyparissus). At the Cloisters, semi-woody santolina, with its silvery, aromatic evergreen foliage, is used to edge the herb garden and some ornamental beds.
The downy, scalloped leaves and chartreuse late-spring flowers of the perennial lady’s mantle are charming, and so is the plant’s provenance. Its Latin name, Alchemilla, “stems from its use in alchemy,” Ms. Still said.
On a dewy morning, water beads up beautifully on it. “This was a very sought-after droplet,” she added, “that would have been collected by alchemists.”
Need a lift? Costmary, once a garden staple but now a relative rarity, has a refreshing quality, she said, with its spearmint scent. One of its common names is Bible leaf.
“It dries really well,” Ms. Still said. “And its leaves were pressed within books, so if you were reading and studying, it would give you a little bit of that uplift that you might need if you were starting to feel a little drowsy.”
Also enlivening to garden and gardener alike are the sunny blooms of calendula (Calendula officinalis) and the vivid blue ones of borage (Borago officinalis), “my two all-time favorite medieval flowers,” she said. These easy annuals have edible flowers that are popular with pollinators.
The old saying that “a garden without borage is like a heart without courage” has stuck with her, she said, noting that it’s “one of those flowers I look to when I need something to cheer me up.”
As for calendula, in her 1943 book, Ms. Freeman wrote that simply to look at the plant’s flowers would “draw evil humours out of the head,” Ms. Still said. “So if you were feeling a little unbalanced, you could gaze into this flower and it would help to set your mind straight.”
A calendula plant appears below the golden fence at the center of “The Unicorn Rests in a Garden,” one of the museum’s seven “Unicorn Tapestries,” from around the start of the 16th century. That inspired the planting of more calendula in the Trie Cloister, another of the three main gardens, which features species identified in the tapestries, with their millefleur, or thousand flowers, backgrounds.
The dyes that color the tapestry threads were derived from plants, each represented in the herb garden. The roots of madder (Rubia tinctorum), grown up a trellis at the Cloisters, yield red dye, Ms. Still said, while blue was derived from the leaves of woad (Isatis tinctoria). Weld (Reseda luteola), a beautiful plant that isn’t rambunctious, she said, was used whole to create a yellow dye.
But caveat emptor, if you’re considering planting the first two: Woad and madder are prodigious self-seeders, and invasive in some regions.
“They want to keep going,” Ms. Still said. “They want to keep telling us their stories, these heavy seeders.” She and the team are happy to stay a step ahead, deadheading and later pulling any errant seedlings.
A Break From Modern Life
The third garden is the first that any visitor to the Cloisters will encounter: the Judy Black Garden in the Cuxa Cloister.
This is a traditional cloister, a courtyard surrounded by covered passageways, intended to be used by resident monks or nuns as “a place for refreshment, for contemplation, for meditation,” Ms. Still said.
Apparently, visitors have picked up on this other aspect of medieval history that the gardens bring to modern life.
“One of the things that I love most about working at the Cloisters is to see people essentially using this cloister in a similar way as it was historically,” Ms. Still said. “They’re sitting down, and they’re peering out into the garden, and they’re just soaking it up.”
Margaret Roach is the creator of the website and podcast A Way to Garden, and a book of the same name.
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