The village of Carmel and its Methodist church, The Church of the Wayfarer, have intimate contacts with antiquity and with early American history. The three Carmelite friars who sailed into Monterey Bay with Sebastian Vizcaino, the Spanish naviga­tor, in December, 1602, marveled at the “Garden Land,” a trans­lation of the Hebrew “Carmel.’ Here in this new western land they saw mirrored the Mt. Carmel of Israel, where Elijah walked and where the Hermits who were precursors of the Carmelite Order once lived. At the friars’ behest, Vizcaino christened our Mt. Carmel and the Carmel River, with the accent shifted from the first to the last syllable. These are the geographical points which have borne their names for the longest time of any in the United States.

Because of the relationship in loveliness and name with the Biblical “garden land,” it is appropriate that the Church of the Wayfarer should have The Master’s Garden.

As one leaves the street door of the church, he sees a wood­en bench beside a rough-hewn stone cross. The inscription there was borrowed from a stone seat at the summit of a pass between Loch Long and Loch Fyne in Scotland, and reads, "Rest and Be Thankful."

  From there one steps into The Master’s Garden. Here are planted and blossoming, in season, some flowerage mentioned in the Bible and are indigenous to the Holy Land are found growing there today. The olive trees date back to the time when the church was built in 1904.

The Garden Committee has spent many hours in planting and caring for this attractive plot of ground, given by J.F. Devendorf in 1902. To walk through this Garden is a pleasure designed to attract and add happiness to all wayfarers who pass this way.

 

FLOWERS IN THE HOLY LAND

Many of the travelers who write about being in the Holy Land in the Spring praise the floral beauty there. Henry Van Dyke exulted: “The rolling hills were embroidered with innumerable flowers. The narcissus-the ‘Rose of Sharon'—had faded. But the little blue ‘lilies of the valley’ were there, and the pink and saf­fron mallows, and the yellow and white daisies, and the violet and snow of cyclamen, and the gold of the genista, and the orange-red of the pimpernel, and, most beautiful of all, the glow­ing scarlet of numberless anemones...There were few trees, except now and then an olive orchard, or a round-topped carob with its withered pods.”

Madeleine and L. Lane Miller comment: “The greatest plant catalogue in Scripture is found in ‘The Song of Solomon.’ The author, working without even an herbal, makes more than seventy-four references to various plants, although his identification of them is not satisfactory to the modern botanist. With an exotically beautiful perfume, flowers move across the pages of these eight short chapters—apple blossoms, which are really apricot blooms; henna flowers; lilies; banks of sweet herbs; and beds of spices, all set in pomegranate orchards, vineyards and palm groves … Jesus loved God's open spaces. Spring to him meant the return of nights warm enough for sleeping under sil­ver stars... Spring to Jesus the Man, meant a season when children of Galilee brought Him handfuls of meadow flowers, asking their names—flowers He used for His mountainside teaching when He called attention to the ‘lilies of the field’ that neither toil nor spin (Matthew 6:28), yet contribute so much beauty to the world. He wanted his hearers to be as free from feverish anx­iety as these thriving little flowers." ¹

The importance of the Master’s garden is stressed by Eleanor King: “Plants mentioned in the Bible are a living link between us and the people of those hallowed and distant times. We cultivate in flower and herb garden, vegetable patch and orchard, plants which grow in the gardens of the Promised Land, plants of which Isaiah and Ezekiel spoke, plants which Jesus used in His para­bles . . . We reach back to the Bible days through two thousand spring times, when we plant a garden.  From Eden to Gethsemane, the Bible is a book of gardens. It is with a garden that Genesis begins, and with a vision of trees bearing fruit that the book of Revelation ends.’’2

1) Encyclopedia of Bible Life, copyright 1944, 1955 Harper & Brothers, reprinted with the permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc
2) Bible Plants for American Gardens, The Macmillan Company, 1941. 

 

The Master’s Garden of the Church of the Wayfarer, Copyright 1996, 36 pages,
Church of the Wayfarer, Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, reprinted with permission.