A. Menghini
THE GARDEN OF SPIRIT.
A trip between symbols of Medieval Garden
The ideal, almost Dantesque journey through the medieval vegetable garden, designed and created by the Author himself, aims to help discover, in the plants, in the geometric shape of the structure and in the numbers associated therewith, those symbolic functions, long-lost philosophies, myths, legends, traditional uses, magical beliefs, astral signs, golden proportions and a thousand and one stories, that have preserved Man’s relationship with the plant kingdom, and in particular with the garden: and in particular, with a specific kind of garden, like the one permeated and dominated by symbols, where “signs” are deemed to constitute an individual rediscovery of Creation, a historical reconstruction of humanistic-naturalistic thought in an age deeply imbibed in culture (forgotten for so long), in the spiritual exaltation of the Self.
From the Garden of Eden to the Stone Forest, via the primitive, apparently irrational, entropy of the forest on the one hand, and on the other human rationality which gradually discovers farming, medicine, crafts, writing, religion, art and science, the narrative leads us to reconsider the concept of the garden and nature in a spiritual, emotional, almost animistic framework, from the traditional viewpoint of medieval Man, a “pilgrim” on this Earth. An intense, constant succession of arcane approaches, often since forgotten, completely immersed in the sacred simplicity of nature as it was conceived of in the Middle Ages.
Alessandro Menghini, Professor in Pharmaceutical Botany at the University of Perugia and publishing editor of Aboca Museum Edizioni.