BARlines

A Biblical Garden with No Apple Trees

Who can recall the Biblical story of Ruth without also recalling her standing, as Keats wrote, “amid the alien corn”? And where would Adam and Eve reside in our imaginations without the Garden of Eden?

Most of us fill out the Biblical narrative with our own imaginary garden. Perhaps we imagine the acanthus growing straight like a Greek column or the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as bearing winesap apples.

Wonder no more. Tucked away in New York City’s concrete jungle is a quarter of an acre of Biblical plants, trees and shrubs.

First opened to the public in a spring downpour in 1973, the Biblical Garden of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest cathedral, was the brainchild of Sara Larkin Loening, and the handiwork of C. Powers Taylor of Rosedale Nurseries in Hawthorne, New York. The project is ecumenical. Its board members include the bishop and the dean of the cathedral, the rector of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan, a rabbi and a Jewish scholar.

The garden’s pathways resemble the hard-baked soil of the Near East.