I have a go at it to read , and I do it as often as the necessary business of life history allows . Sometimes when real life is too consuming , and I ca n’t face a literary novel or a meaty life , I grow to closed book . As a secret devotee and a nurseryman , I find special consolation in the Brother Cadfael serial publication , by the former English author Edith Pargeter , who wrote under the name Ellis Peters .
Peters ’ sleuthhound , Brother Cadfael , is a twelfth C monk at an English monastery near Shrewsbury . Before entering the cloistered living at the modern age of forty , Cadfael had been a soldier and Crusader , profession that allowed him to go extensively . When he finally settled down to life story as brother and herb doctor at the monastery of St. Peter and St. Paul , he fetch with him a knowledge of healing humanistic discipline and useful plants as well as a hoard of exotic seeded player gathered on his travel .
Brother Cadfael has lover all over the world , and most of them would believably acknowledge that the plots , especially after the first ten Christian Bible or so , are somewhat formulaic . Without a doubt , the good matter about the books is the adorable , intensely atmospheric writing . Peters ’ inquiry was so thorough that she is able to put the reader squarely into the life of a twelfth century Benedictine Thelonious Sphere Monk . Perhaps equally important from a horticulture stand , she puts the gardener / reader squarely into Brother Cadfael ’s fruitful monastic garden . There is so much herbal lore and garden - related contingent in the twenty - book Cadfael series , that a couple of English authors , Rob Talbot and Robin Whiteman , were able to assemble it into a script ring Brother Cadfael ’s Herb Garden ( Little Brown & Co , London , 1996 ) .
Brother Cadfael was the abbey ’s herb doctor , so his chief responsibility was to grow and sometimes process all the various useful plants needed by the brothers . Then , as now , the terminal figure “ herbaceous plant ” is used to describe a plant that can be used for medicine , fragrancy , flavorer , or food . In the twenty - first century that encompasses a muckle of plants . There were an telling number in the twelfth one C as well .
Cadfael ’s herbs were well lean , and he take aim peachy satisfaction in the appearance of turned world , the leafing out of the various plants , and even of the drying stalks left in the garden and the fields after a successful crop . Though he was bound by the Benedictine Rule , which balance work with adoration and prayer , and prescribes how each 60 minutes of the twenty-four hour period is to be spent , Cadfael often bump compelling rationality to spend superfluous sentence in the garden or in his herbarium workshop . Every gardener can sympathize his reasons .
Today Cadfael would be promise a “ four season gardener ” . During the growing season he cultivated , planted and tended his bed . After the harvesting , in the late fall and wintertime , he saw to the storing of the travel along yr ’s seeds , the drying of the various herbs and the mixture of the salves and potions which he and the abbey ’s prescribed druggist used to handle illness . Then as now there was a unvarying supplying of collicky babe , woman with menstrual problems , middle aged hoi polloi with aching joints and the mortally ominous suffering from intractable annoyance . All who seek help at the monastery were drug with Cadfael ’s plant life - free-base remedies . The collicky baby , for example , might receive a sirup that included fennel and spate . In the wintertime , Monk with cold and tender throats were handle with a potpourri made mostly of horehound , an herb that is distantly related to to both thyme and Russian sage . About half of the plants in Cadfael ’s garden were used in one physique or another to treat digestive job , though there were more than a few , such as field peas and members of the sugar category , that may also have caused them .
meter after time in the books , Peters do source to her sleuth ’s employment of “ poppy syrup ” or “ poppy juice ” to treat torturesome annoyance . As a Crusader , Cadfael had gathered seeds of the opium poppy ( Papaver somniferum ) in the Middle East , along with the cognition of how to make the seeded player into a medicinal drug that could be given reliably to those for whom no other remediation was uncommitted . After taking up the monastic life he maturate his poppy and take seeds from the ripe plants each year until he arrive at a strain with the qualities that he found most useful . As someone in monomania of such a powerful remedy for pain , “ the principal enemy of man ” , Cadfael was welcome in the abbey ’s small hospital and in sick rooms throughout the surrounding community .
The most sympathetic thing about Cadfael ’s little domain — the gardens and field and his herbarium workshop — was that it was an oasis of calm , comfort and lodge in the chaotic and often life-threatening mediaeval existence . The monastic ’s shop , for exemplar , was lovesome in winter , because a changeless fire was needed to falsify the medicinal syrups and potions . In the garden the plants were grown in well - ordered rows , and the herbaceous plant garden was divided into easy tended sections , plausibly like those on display at The Cloisters museum in New York . Poisonous plants were grown in a disjoined country , to protect the unwary .
Brother Cadfael ’s healing feeling always work on me , remind me that the garden can be a source of health and inspiration as well as a metaphor for life . The twelfth century was not so different from our own ; the weapon system are more dangerous now , but human nature is resolutely unchanged . When I turn back to my own beds and margin , I think that while Brother Cadfael would have been distress by the weeds , he would also have shared my delectation in the roses , mint and lavender .
