Holy Mary, Mother of Gardens

I BEGIN IN the garden, which sounds biblical but is literal. It’s the day after the spring equinox, and I’m standing outside the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. The National Shrine is the nation’s largest Roman Catholic church. It’s stuffed to the vaulted ceilings with religious art, but I’m not here for the soaring mosaics and gilded icons.

What I’ve come to see — the Shrine’s Mary garden — turns out to be underwhelming. A statue of the Virgin presides over an empty reflection pool; the garden’s central fountain is also dry. The circular stone terrace is flanked by cherry trees and dormant bushes. The rose bushes are pruned back, and the tulips have yet to open. Except for cherry blossoms unfurling overhead amid a hum of bees, much of the garden still sleeps from winter. I expected a profusion of tangled plants and lush greenery, but this early in the season, nothing much is blooming.

I came to the garden looking for evidence of a movement. Pope Francis’ 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home” called for a global ecological conversion. Inspired by a faith that views humans as Earth’s caretakers, and guided by the science behind native gardening, Catholics around the world have heeded the pope’s call by planting native habitats. Parishes, backyards, and schools are restoring land with local species. Some habitats take the form of Mary gardens: devotional spaces that both honor the Mother of God and enhance biodiversity. Other habitats convert manicured landscapes into pollinator gardens.

The gardeners who tend these spaces range from Girl Scouts to a pair of Instagram-savvy nuns; what they share is a belief that planting native species is a practical way to integrate their faith and environmental values — and to respond to the climate crisis.

Known by name

MARY GARDENS, DESIGNED to honor the world’s most iconic mother, have roots in medieval Europe. Some — like the one at the National Shrine — function primarily as contemplative spaces. Traditional versions include a statue of the Virgin flanked by plants symbolizing an element of her character: white lilies to represent purity, maidenhair fern to reflect her hair. Mary gardens began spreading in the United States after 1951, when two Catholic laypeople, Edward McTague and John Stokes Jr., publicized the concept by distributing plants that were native to Europe. Designs for European Mary gardens still abound online, but recently Catholics have started designing devotional gardens using plants endemic to their local region. Organizations like the Marianist Environmental Education Center in Ohio and Saint Kateri Conservation Center offer suggestions for plants with Marian associations that reflect diverse U.S. regions.

Annalise Michaelson is a horticulturist and Catholic convert who specializes in helping parishes and schools identify native alternatives for their gardens. She’s particularly interested in designing Mary gardens around species that reflect both Mary’s nature and the local climate. Like Mary, gardens give birth to new life. Michaelson says that designing Mary gardens with native species is an intuitive way to combine reverence for Mary’s life-giving nature with environmental action.

The traditional names of Marian plants, Michaelson tells me, originated from an intimacy with creation. The monks and nuns who created the first European Mary gardens were deeply familiar with their local landscapes. They knew what plants bloomed around the feast of the Ascension and what flowers resembled Mary’s veil. “The act of naming is so rooted in our role as human beings,” Michaelson says, pointing to Adam’s first charge to name the inhabitants of Eden. Identifying native plants for a Mary garden can be a spiritual exercise as well as a way to grow in intimacy with the natural world. She encourages gardeners to walk through their local landscape and study the qualities of native species, meditating on how they might reflect or illuminate Mary’s character.

When choosing native alternatives, Michaelson thinks about several things. First, she looks for “a visual similarity in form or color that evokes an analogous aesthetic response — finding an appropriately sharp native for something like crown of thorns.” She also thinks about symbolic or liturgical applications — for example, swapping an Easter lily for a native flower that blooms in the spring. Instead of a red Oriental poppy — traditionally associated with the blood of the crucifixion — Michaelson recommends that West Coast gardeners plant native California poppies. Marigolds (Mary’s gold) can be replaced with desert marigold in the Southwest or golden alexanders in the Midwest. On a practical level, she also selects plants that gardeners can access at a nursery.

Depending on the region, a native Mary garden might include anything from cacti to prairie grasses. In other words, these gardens take as many forms as devotion itself. The Mary garden at Saint John Neumann Catholic Church in Reston, Va., reflects the parish’s Hispanic population. A statue of La Virgen de Guadalupe stands at the center, surrounded by swamp milkweed, black-eyed Susan, and blue aster. When the garden was complete, the church blessed the space with an outdoor service held in both English and Spanish.

From field to flourishing

MARY GARDENS ARE just one expression of a larger movement among Catholics to use native plants to prevent biodiversity collapse. At Saint John Neumann, “Laudato Si’” inspired parishioners to form a group called Care for Our Common Home. The group focuses on education, advocacy, prayer, and sustainability initiatives within the parish. One of these early initiatives was to plant a native pollinator garden in a grassy area on the church’s grounds.

Thanks to the work of ecologists like Douglas Tallamy, who promotes conservation measures that can start with your yard, there’s a growing public understanding that native species increase biodiversity and climate resilience. Manicured lawns and ornamental plants, coupled with endless urban development, destroy healthy ecosystems. Native plant species provide food and habitat for local pollinators and wildlife. When native plants replace lawns, they also benefit people by cutting back on pesticide and herbicide use. Many native species are also adept at sequestering carbon, which reduces atmospheric carbon and builds soil health.

Ed Sabo, a founding member of Care for Our Common Home, helped oversee the Saint John Neumann pollinator garden’s design, collecting advice and ideas from Tallamy’s research, an Audubon Society ambassador, and a local group that provides information about Northern Virginia native plants. Sabo also turned to the Saint Kateri Conservation Center, founded in 2000, which offers educational resources and practical help for people who want to restore native habitats.

The pollinator garden is now a flourishing web of relationships. There’s the soil, with all its microorganisms, and the native plants like mountain mint and red bee balm that grow from it. These days, Sabo says, it’s filled “with an amazing variety of bees” as well as beetles. Monarch butterflies and eastern tiger swallowtails pass through. The garden also draws people: staff members eat lunch on the benches surrounding the garden and parishioners visit after Mass. On days when the church hosts a farmer’s market in its parking lot, Sabo notices kids and their parents wandering down to play by the garden.

Sabo says his faith spurs him to care for and appreciate the more-than-human world. “When you go back and read the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, you really get a sense that God is part of creation, and part of us, in us, through us. Creation is there to be enjoyed and viewed on its own, not as a resource — just to appreciate nature and God’s creation for what it is, on its own.”

Abundant conversions

THE GROWING INTEREST in native plants isn’t just happening on church property. When ecologist Bill Jacobs converted his suburban lawn in Long Island, N.Y., into a riotous garden of native plants, his neighbors were baffled. But for Jacobs — who founded Saint Kateri Conservation Center — this was an obvious decision. “Relationships are essential to our faith, beginning with God, who is a relationship of three divine Persons,” says Jacobs. “The science of ecology is also about relationships — the relationships between living organisms and their environment.”

Heather Wilson first transformed her backyard into native habitat while living in a 1906 bungalow in Portland, Ore. The plot was postage-stamp-sized, but that didn’t stop her from tearing out the miniature lawn and replacing ornamental plants with species native to the damp Pacific Northwest. When she and her family moved into a house with a larger yard, she began the process again. A fig tree growing outside the new house reminded Wilson of her parish’s scripture garden and inspired her to consider plants’ spiritual symbolism.

Wilson was already familiar with the connection between certain flowers and the Virgin Mary. She decided to incorporate some native Mary plants into her yard. After removing most of the lawn and adding a native hedgerow, she selected native groundcover with Marian resonances, like the Western maidenhair fern and lady fern.

Around the same time, Wilson learned that her local parish was engaging in a similar effort. With the help of Annalise Michaelson, Portland’s Madeleine Parish started transitioning its manicured gardens into native habitats. Wilson’s priest encouraged parishioners to adopt and tend sections of the new garden. “I lead a Girl Scout troop, and in Girl Scouting, anytime you see anything you think, ‘Is there a badge for that?’ And generally there is,” Wilson says. Last Earth Day, she and her scouts joined a planting effort at Madeleine. This year Wilson plans to adopt a section of the garden with her troop. Together she and the girls will transition their small section of parish grounds from ornamental to native species.

With stewardship of around 177 million acres, the Roman Catholic Church is one of the world’s biggest landowners. If even a fraction of these churches converted land to native habitats, the decision could have a ripple effect of restoring biodiversity and building climate resilience. “My dream is to see Catholic-owned land flourish with restored native plantings stewarded by faithful parish communities,” Michaelson says. This effort would mean removing invasive plants, coordinating planting days for native species, and forming small groups “to spread ecological literacy and contemplative devotion via Mary gardens.”

Since the publication of “Laudato Si’,” Sabo has watched ecological interest grow among local churches. “I would say it’s slowly building — but it is building,” he says. Saint John Neumann is now part of a diocese-wide group of Care for Our Common Home teams. Within this group, a handful of other parishes have planted native gardens on church grounds.

Michaelson cautions that native gardens aren’t a fix-all solution. “Native plants are not a magic potion to reverse the damages of habitat loss and biodiversity collapse.” She believes that lasting change hinges on humans truly seeing and attending to the world around them. The more we become intimate with the other members of our ecosystem — touching them, smelling them, learning their names — and the more we contemplate their beauty and diversity, the more we will be compelled to preserve biodiversity and build resilient ecosystems in our own backyards.

“True climate resilience is downstream from an invested, ecologically literate, spiritually enlivened humanity,” Michaelson adds. “This is the power of learning, growing, and sharing the joys of native plants.”