This chapter examines two horticultural metaphors, the garden and the field, both symbolizing the body of the Virgin. I will begin by situating them in one of the scriptural sources most often mined for images of the Virgin, the Song of Songs. I will then study the works of Gonzalo de Berceo, one of the poets most studied by Hispano-medievalists, reassessing his famous verdant space in the light of liturgical and theological sources.

In the Song of Songs, a garden symbolizes the young woman three times (4.12, 4.15, 5.1). She is also compared to other green and verdant spaces. She is a mountain of myrrh and her shoots form an orchard (4.13). She is also a flower of the field (2.1). The Song of Songs eulogy of the Shulamite, the beloved bride, compares her to an Eastern paradise teeming with lush vegetation, filled with exotic plants, releasing beautiful perfumes into the air, and providing shade and recreation to those inside. The lover's metaphor for his bride, an enclosed and planted space, reveals that, from time immemorial, verdant places have symbolized womanhood. The earth is tilled by the gardener, seeds are sown, and the garden is watered. The seeds sown there bloom and flourish, just like the male seed sown in a woman's womb in procreation. Both women and gardens are fertile and bear new life. Woman, like the land, can be fruitful or barren. Woman, like the earth, can be ploughed, dug, and watered in the sexual act. From ancient times to the Middle Ages, when theologians still associated women with the earth, gardens provided a powerful metaphor of two states of womanhood: land untilled represents virginity and cultivated land, fertility. Earth was the essential element of the Creation story, with man, Adam, created from the earth.

Along with many other objects and places in the deeply erotic symbolism that the Song provides in its various translations, gardens became the paradigm of human love in vernacular poetry.5 The garden and its fountain are closed to outsiders. They are sealed, yet redolent of the promise that they will eventually open.