People who grow gardens grow in faith, according to the Rev. Marsh Hudson-Knapp, which accounts in large part for the Bible garden he helped establish adjacent to his church a quarter-century ago.
“A lot of people’s spirituality is rooted in nature,” said Hudson- Knapp, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Fair Haven, Vt. “There’s always been a deep (biblical) connection with gardening. With each new season, life is bursting forth again.”
A Bible garden is not a theme recommended for the casual hobbyist. Cultivating every flower, shrub, food crop or fruit mentioned in Scriptures is a daunting objective, especially if you’re trying to be exacting about plant choice.
More than 120 plants have been mentioned in the Bible, although that total is open to interpretation. How do you determine, for example, exactly what kind of “burning bush” was cited in the story of Moses (Exodus 3:2)?
“We decided not to be all that precise,” Hudson-Knapp said in a telephone interview. “We use substitutes at times, especially where we can’t duplicate the growing conditions of certain plants.”
There are plants of the Bible, and then there are plants of the Bible lands, said Lytton John Musselman, who chairs the Department of Biological Sciences at Old Dominion University and is author of “Figs, Dates, Laurel and Myrrh: Plants of the Bible and the Quran.”
“Original translators of the King James version didn’t have much knowledge about plants native to the Near East so they read into a lot of things,” he said.
A notable example is the apple, as in the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. “Apples were not part of the agriculture from that era. It was more likely an apricot that Eve handed Adam if you want to be literal about it. Apples had no natural role in that part of the world.”
Hudson-Knapp, whose Bible garden has had several makeovers, found a convenient way to get around the ongoing apple-or- apricot, good-vs.-evil debate stemming from Genesis 2:16-3:19. “We had an apricot tree growing in our garden for a long time, but after it winter-killed, we replaced it with an apple.”
