Vegetable and Kitchen Herb Garden @museum.de

F 2: This part of the monastic garden is where they grow vegetables and kitchen herbs, which are demanding and require a lot of care. As in medieval times, they’re planted in raised beds to ensure a particularly good yield.

M 1: The original garden attached to the Jerichow collegiate foundation has not been preserved, because use of the grounds has changed so many times since the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, this newly laid out garden provides a clear illustration of what that garden may once have looked like and which areas it comprised.

F 2: The vegetable and kitchen herb garden used to be crucial. Vegetables and herbs were more important to the canons’ diet than, say, fish or meat. In fact, meat-eating was banned. Here, we find varieties of vegetables and kitchen herbs that were already being cultivated in the Middle Ages. We’re able to identify the varieties from botanical treatises compiled in medieval monasteries. The raised beds contain chard and parsnips, calabash (which is a type of gourd), cabbage both white and red, beetroot and beans, common mallow (malva neglecta), coriander, a member of the carrot family called skirret (sium sisarum) and the asparagus-like Good King Henry (blitum bonus-henricus).

M 1: Perhaps you’ve noticed the absence of the potato, the tomato and sweet corn in that list? They were unknown in the Middle Ages and only introduced into Europe in the 16th century, after European seafarers reached the Americas.

F 2: In the show garden, you can marvel at how varied the selection was even during the monastic period – perhaps even more so than it is now. And it’s unlikely that the canons themselves worked in the monastic garden – that duty probably fell to the lay brothers.