| BRITAIN - LAND OF MOON-CALENDARS
About eight different lunar gardening calendars
go on sale for AD2000 in the UK. Let's group them by the different zodiac
references which they use:
Let us hope that this diversity of viewpoint stimulates some debate. There isn't much coherent tradition in England about lunar gardening, maybe because the climate is too erratic - or, maybe it was the scientific revolution of the 17th century that knocked it on the head. In contrast, there is more of a continuous tradition in middle-Europe where farmers will more take for granted that an almanac is a sensible idea. From Kepler, who composed yearly almanacs in Germany, to Thun in the 20th century, there is a continuous tradition. There were some fine old English gardening classics from the 16th and early 17th centuries which are replete with lunar lore. For example, To the better furthering of the gardener's travails, he ought afore to consider, that the Garden earth be apt and good, wel turned in with dung, at a due time of the year, in the increase of the Moon, she occupying an apt place in the Zodiack, in agreeable aspect of Saturn, & well-placed in the sight of heaven ... for otherwise his care and pains bestowed about the seeds and plants, nothing availeth the Garden. wrote Thomas Hill in The Gardener's Labyrinth, 1577, Ch. 21. This book explained about (harmonious) sextile aspects between Saturn and the Moon: ‘it is then commended to labour the earth, sow, and plant;' whereas, during the (stressful) square aspect between these two, it was ‘denied utterly to deal in such matters.' The trine was also approved, but the opposition was not. Similar advice featured in seventeenth-century British works, e.g. The Whole Art of Husbandry; while Dariotus Redivivus advised that farmers ‘ought to have a special respect to the state and condition of Saturn, that he be not ... afflicted, because he hath chief dominion over husbandry and the commodities of the Earth; let him therefore (if you can so fit it) be in good aspect ... to the Moon'27. For planting crops, the general advice was: ‘Plant what you intend, the Moon being either in conjunction, sextile or trine of Saturn ....' These lunar-gardening traditions were terminated by the new 'scientific' philosophy that arrived later in the seventeenth century. |