The healing properties of the Museum of the Order of St John’s Cloister Garden are on display this Saturday
By EC1 Echo
The Cloister Garden at the Museum of the Order of St John’s is one of Clerkenwell’s great secrets. Walk into this sheltered space in the heart of the city and the stresses of life disappear. Paved and planted with paths and beds, it is far more than just a place to eat sandwiches in peace – although that’s not a bad use of this sheltered space – but also somewhere designed for healing, based on the ‘paradise gardens’ of the ancients and stocked with medicinal herbs like rosemary, lavender, and wormwood, alluding to the medical traditions of the Order of St John which cultivated such plants for healing. This aspect is set to be brought out in the garden’s Open Day on 10 June, which coincides with London Open Gardens weekend.
“The garden has several different strands,” says Gabby Boraston, the Museum’s community gardener. “It’s partly about making it continue to look good, expanding the outreach of the museum and making family workshops which means we can get hands-on with the herbs.”
The garden hasn’t always been a haven. Pictures from 100 years ago show a place strewn with rubble. It was then connected with St John Street, a link that remains an aspiration. Refurbished in 2011, it was planted with several herbs from the Mediterranean – including myrtle, oregano and sage – giving it a sense of timelessness that is compounded by a stately olive tree, somewhat over a century old, that looks as if it has been here forever. “There are a lot of different stories about where it comes from,” says Gabby. “Some people say Italy, Spain and Portugal or, given the history of the Order, Jerusalem.” Either way, it took 15 people to plant it and it now occupies centre stage.
The garden’s medicinal herbs are being brought to the fore by Gabby, including St John’s Wort, a herb noted for the alleviation of depression and similarly to the Order itself, dedicated to St John the Baptist. “I thought it would be a good idea to have lots of different types of St John’s Wort,” says Gabby, who has found several varieties including one that grows in Malta, which “has a significance for the Order of St John”, and another from Mount Olympus in Greece, as well as more types from other parts of Europe. “The idea is to have a lot of traditional European herbs, some of which are native and others from elsewhere including Eastern Europe as well as the Mediterranean,” she says.
There’s a need to prune and harvest, and Gabby aims to use those times as a workshop. The coronation, for example, created a crown-making workshop. “It’s a way to use the plants for both learning and healing.”
The Cloister Garden’s open day is on 10 June – the same day as Open Gardens Day – exploring some of the medicinal plants in the Cloister Garden with Gabby Boraston.
Visit museumstjohn.org.uk For other gardens on London Open Gardens, see londongardenstrust.org
