The Morville Hours

"Nowadays, adrift in an affectless no-man's-land, we are cut off not only from the hopes and fears, the triumphs and despairs of the agricultural year, but from the shared emotions of the great story which plays itself out month by month in the liturgical year.  The twenty-first century is fighting a losing battle to keep its calendar.  Gardeners of course have never lost it."  ...Katherine Swift

Good Friday was an appropriate day to finish reading Katherine Swift's The Morville Hours: The Story of a Garden.   When I began a couple of weeks ago I knew it was not going to be a quick read.  There would be some reading,  research and rereading.

Katherine Swift moved into the Dower House in Shropshire, UK in 1988 with a desire to develop gardens on the estate.   The National Trust ask for a three dimensional design.  Instead she wrote of her visions.  With only her words and some well placed support her ideas were ultimately approved.

Using the ancient Book of Hours as her outline she takes us on the journey of building the gardens on the Shropshire estate.  Beginning with Vigils, the opening of the monastic day, we travel through the hours, days and seasons of the garden's birth and life.   

Through each of the hours, Vigils, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and finally Compline, we are given lessons in history, botany, astronomy and  theology.   She shares with us her successes, failures, sorrows and patience.  


My favorite section is the last, Compline, the last hour before bedtime.  And, as I said, entering and finishing this chapter on Good Friday seemed right.   

Talking about her last moments with her father she writes:

"In an interview given to the New York Times in 1998 Sir Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, formulated the now famous proposition that we are all composed of the dust of long-dead stars.  When the Milky Way was formed, about ten billion years ago, it contained only the simplest of atoms, hydrogen and helium.  Then the first stars formed, and the building blocks of life - carbon, oxygen and the rest of the periodic table - were created from hydrogen and helium through the nuclear fusion that kept the stars shining.  In time these stars ran out of fuel, exploded into supernovae, and threw all the atoms back into space.  New stars gradually condensed out of the debris.  One of them was our sun with our group of planets orbiting it.  All the atoms there are - you, me, the garden, Pa - were once inside a star, and will be again."

image via NASA

I have never found it difficult to merge science and faith.  To me, they make perfect companions; one not demanding to be chosen over the other.  I find it rather comforting to think one day I may be one of the stars overhead.

I borrowed The Morville Hours from the library and it must  be returned.  I am hoping to soon have it in my own personal library. 

Enjoy!