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| The cloister garden of St. Paul Outside the Wall in Rome |
Hello lovely readers!
And what to say next?
I've had other blogs before; I'm not entirely sure what's so intimidating about a new one. But I suppose fear of a blank blog is similar to fear of a blank page. The only way to conquer it is to put words on it. As I'm doing currently.
Why is this blog here? This blog is here in order to chronicle my adventures in researching the Cloister Gardens of the Order of Preachers (the Dominican Order). I have received a generous grant from the University of Illinois Landscape Architecture Department (as well as from the Sigma Lambda Alpha society, an honor society for Landscape Architects) in order to pursue this research. One of the conditions of the grant was that I chronicle my adventures and learning experiences online somewhere so that the Department can follow along.
This feels a little bit like Dear Mr. Knightley by Katherine Reay...Samantha also receives a grant and has to keep the donor updated on her progress. Although hopefully this summer will be less dramatic than her life. (Apologies--despite the fact that I'm a Landscape Architect, I think largely in literary references, and that will insist on coming through on this blog from time to time, I'm sure.)
I very much hope that the Department will enjoy following along, and that anyone else who finds this blog does, as well! I'll do my best to post in a regular manner. (At least every two weeks is the requirement...who knows. I may post more often.)
It won't be a purely academic blog. I'll be writing in a professional way, as befits this blog's raison d'etre, but I fully expect to talk about more than merely the analysis I'm doing. (Most of that will be saved for my senior thesis.) You may hear about my transportation adventures, how I feel about being in France for three weeks when I don't speak French, and my experiences trying to communicate with Dominicans in three different languages, in addition to what I'm thinking about cloister gardens. We shall see.
Lastly, for this first post, a bit about what's to come in the next eight weeks.
The reason for this research is something I wrote extensively about in my applications for the grants I've received, so I quote:
"The tradition of monastery and convent cloister gardens, and other gardens surrounding monasteries, such as the monastery vegetable garden, and sacristy garden, is ancient. However, while scholars have studied and described in detail the architecture of medieval monasteries, such as Cluny, and have studied certain records of medieval monastery gardens, such as the St. Gaul Cloister Plan, little study has been done on the modern permutations of monastic cloister gardens (and other types of monastic gardens), and how they both build on the ancient traditions and innovate for the needs of the monastery in the modern world.
Because of my Catholic background, I have always been interested in monasteries and convents, and especially their gardens, because they are a landscape architectural dimension of monasteries that are vital to monastic life, and because relatively little has been written about them. I would like to study the monasteries and convents of Europe in particular, because many of these communities have existed and have cultivated their cloister gardens for centuries. For some of the gardens, there are records of how they have been cultivated in the past, and by comparing these records to the modern cultivation of the gardens, I can analyze how approaches to these gardens have changed or otherwise. In addition, the study of the different permutations of European cloister gardens in various areas and climates can inform the future design and restoration of American cloister gardens.
The interest, to me, of the Dominican order lies in the fact that while the male branch of the order are not cloistered, they still cultivate cloister gardens in many of their Houses. Seeing a broad variety of monasteries in a broad variety of urban and rural contexts in varying climates and conditions will allow a detailed analysis of ways in which Dominican cloister gardens differ and are similar and will perhaps allow for the development of a set of design guidelines for a distinctively Dominican cloister."
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