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Mary's Garden Thanks to the St. Theresa's Homeschool group (Douglasville, Georgia) and Catholic Mom LynnM. for great tips on creating an interactive Mary's garden with your children! Want to share a photo of your family's Mary Garden? Email lisa@catholicmom.com and we will share your photo here. Happy gardening! |
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Lisa and Eric's Mary's Garden As we all know, the month of May is devoted to Our Lady, but July seems as wonderful a time as any to honor Mary with the planting of your very own Mary's Garden. A few weeks back, I shared with you that my son Eric and I were busily working on our very own Mary's garden. My mother and sister provided the impetus, blessing me with a beautiful statue of Our Lady of Fatima for my birthday. My ten year old son Eric took on the project with his usual zest and attention to detail. He surfed over to the wonderful web site www.mgardens.org and immediately began to compile a list of flowers originally named in honor of Mary. My suggestion that we didn't need to stick strictly to this official list was immediately vetoed...only flowers specifically celebrating Mary made the "cut" on Eric's list. The web site offered a detailed list of over 100 flowers and plants. We next researched the list to determine which plants and flowers could survive Fresno's 100+ degree summer temperatures. The dirty work then began! It took us two days to dig up the hardpan (rock solid) soil for the bed and lay out the border. In retrospect, this was precious time with my ten year old son, who probably won't want to have much to do with Mom for very much longer! While we dug and hoed, we talked about so many different things, laughing and pondering and just spending time together. What would probably have been a lonely job had I taken it on alone became a memory I'll treasure forever (or at least as long as the blisters last!). Once the bed was dug and prepared, the fun of choosing and planting the flowers came next. We bought our flowers at our local discount store, carefully considering the color scheme and Marian names of the flowers (our roses are "Pristines", a beautiful white blossom as pure as Mary's heart). Now, two weeks later, the petunias ("Our Lady's Praises") and zinnias ("The Virgin") have begun to bloom in earnest. Each morning, I spend a few quiet moments in prayer in front of my garden asking Our Lady's intercession in the course of a busy mommy's day. I can see Our Lady from my kitchen window as I wash dinner dishes. Mary smiles at me through my laundry room window as I fold the boys clean clothes. The fact that Eric was so involved in planning and preparing the garden adds immeasurably to the joy it brings me each day. Soon these lazy days of summer will be giving way to fall, and Eric will be online again investigating bulbs for autumn planting! Lisa
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Dear Lisa,
I found your link on
the Mary's Garden website and I wanted to send along pictures
of the Mary Garden our homeschool group completed this month at
our Parish, St. Theresa's in Douglasville, Georgia. The garden
and statue were blessed following the Queenship of Mary Mass on
August 22nd and children from the Parish participated in the
Mass, in the procession with the statue to the garden and then with
the planting of the final flowers . We planned
the garden to be in front of the Parish playground, so that it would
be quite accessible to the children and the CCD classes.
The homeschool children added their own version of the stepping
stones one of your readers had mentioned. These stones are
a "homemade" stepping stone and in each stone (10
in all) the children took pebbles and spelled out the words "Hail
Mary" while the concrete was still wet...also adding medals,
jewels, and flowers. Future plans for the garden include
adding flowers for the Fall and Winter months and using the garden
for educational opportunities ( for the homeschool group and the
CCD classes).
Thank you for the addition
of this on your web page!
God Bless you,
Kathleen S.
Click each image to view at full size
Thanks to LynnM. for sharing the following note and photo!
Dear
Lisa, God bless,
LynnM. |
