Centered around several beautiful garden statues, large gardens belonging to the community lay within the cloisters, and outside others surrounded giant water fountains, with jets spraying 20 feet into the air. Numbers of these cottages and gardens surrounded the cloisters with central water fountains for water supply which eliminated the necessity of having large centerpiece garden fountains for the grounds under cultivation. Each of the brethren, like the Egyptian monks, occupied a detached cottage, to which was added in the twelfth century a small garden, decorated and cultivated by its tenant.

They also took less pride in owning beautiful buildings, statuary, and garden decor. St.Among the orders of friars were the Dominicans, founded by the Spanish Dominic, and the Franciscans, by St. Bernard founded the most famous of all Cistercian garden communities in the wild and gloomy valley of Clairvaux, beside a clear stream that provided plentiful water for the surrounding garden fountains. Bruno in 1084, dwelt in monasteries planned to isolate, as completely as Artistic light and shadow Roller Coating Aluminium Sheets Factory possible, each member of thecommunity. Their monasteries, lush with flowing water from large fountains and dramatic statuary, stood in contrast to those gardens as conspicuously bare of decoration as those of the Benedictines.

These gardens were built in the hollows of valleys, where culture could fertilize the soil, and where there was an abundance of water to fill the fountains and irrigate the land. This was to fulfill the rules peculiar to their order, obliging them to live in absolute silence and solitude, the only sounds coming from the small, ornate fountains found in the corners of the courtyard. An ardent lover of nature, he wrote, "You will find more in woods than in books, trees and stones will teach you what you can never learn from school teachers. Francis of Assisi, in the thirteenth century.Decorative Gardens and Garden Fountains of the CisterciansPosted by nick_niesen on November 1st, 2010The Cistercians, following in the footsteps of the Benedictines, did much to further the progress of horticulture and decorative gardens on the continent and in England..

Wanderers over the country, preaching and begging for food wherever they happened to stop, unlike the members of other orders, the friars required but small establishments, and few cultivated acres for their food supply, relying instead on natural streams rather than public fountains for their sustenance. The Carthusians, belonging to an order founded by St. Both lived according to different lights from the monks, despised all luxury, and their fountains were stark, plain, and functional. The several divisions of ground were separated by intersecting canals, with water supplied to the fountains by the river Alba." One of the most sacred spots in the monastery, now sadly deprived of all its ancient glory, was a little plot of ground whose cultivation was his special care