15 Medieval Gardening Methods We Completely Forgot

Around the year 1440, an English gardener wrote his trade into verse. His name has come down to us as Jon Gardener, and his poem is the oldest gardening manual in the English language. The garden he describes ran on no money at all. Nothing was bought, and nothing that could rot, burn, or be woven was ever thrown away. His methods fed households that could never afford a failed season. American gardeners now spend north of forty billion dollars a year, and plenty of those gardens still fail by July. Somewhere between his world and ours, we dropped the entire toolkit. Fifteen methods built gardens like his. One of them would later ripen pineapples in an English winter, using nothing but a farmyard waste product.