A history of the sanctuary garden. (includes examples and explanations of such gardens)

There's nothing indefinite about the word "sanctuary." It means safety. Protection was first offered, unspoken, by the topography of places where sanctuary was found: a hilltop, an island, a cave, a ring of encircling hills. Then came design: a shady grove, strong walls, or a single line of stone markers.

Sanctuary has also always been enforced by the rituals and laws and expectations that are part of all cultural heritage. In Western culture, the word itself comes from the Latin "sanctus," meaning "holy." "Garden" is more vaguely defined. Its meanings vary greatly, especially if the gardens of many cultures are taken into account. Ryoan-ji to beefsteak tomatoes. Originally--and still worth remembering now--the word "garden" described space, not plants. "Garden" comes from "gher," an Indo-European root meaning simply "enclosure." A holy enclosure, the sanctuary garden.

Every civilization on every continent has made its own versions, both in myth and in actuality: Islamic Paradise, the Garden of Eden, Delos, Ise, a clearing in a forest. What's needed? "A temple implies a sanctuary, but a sanctuary or holy spot does not necessarily contain a temple," says the Encyclopedia Britannica. So the stripped-down sanctuary is just a place on earth, with a boundary, and a sense of divinity and safety within in.

Use divides sacred outdoor enclosures into public and private spaces. Public sanctuaries were where the oldest forms of worship were held. A community's celebration of the gods in prayer, procession, and sacrifice was intended to order the rounds of nature. From drought, famine, plagues, war, and other disasters the sanctuary offered the hope of relief, if not relief itself. A sanctuary's form often mirrored a culture's concept of the cosmos, and its vision of an afterlife.

The list of public sanctuary uses is long. Ritual within a sacred enclosure has embodied hopes for human continuity, often through the metaphor of rebirth. The traversing of that sacred boundary, often a mirroring of the passage from life to afterlife, presents the reality of death effectively and compassionately. Within a sanctuary's precincts, the collective memory--the collective worth--of a people's past is enshrined. Metaphorically, then, the sanctuary garden has served the profoundly political end of embodying the polls, the "body politic." The "privilege of sanctuary" offered by both religious and civil law that existed within the temenos, or sanctuary boundary, in classical antiquity was transferred indoors to Christian churches. It extended the concept of protection to the individual.

By that same extension, private sanctuary as private property arose when the concept of the individual divided itself from common consciousness. Private gardens, like public sanctuaries, have offered not only contact with nature but also relief from pain, distress, and fatigue--mental, emotional, and physical. They have also provided pleasure for all the senses: sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing. And their physical spaces are a metaphor for psychological space, the repository of private meaning, self-examination, and memory.

Whether public or private, therefore, two of the most important functions of a sanctuary garden are to stretch time through memory and allusion, and to offer a gateway to something larger than self, or even human community. Historically, that "something" has been a magical sense of the real nature of earth, and of human connection with it.