What constitutes a Garden?

Yesterday I rather foolishly took on a rather long “stroll” near Lorca to try to find the Menhir de Serrato, There is a sign post in Lorca saying it is 4.5kms away. Then I turn up a road that says 1.5kms to the Menhir. I drive over a kilometer more and find another sign. Logic would say it is about half maybe one kilometer further on up the track. Wrong. And it also turned out to be a bit of a scorcher and we left the water in the car..... and of course with creeping weakening muscles because of ms, and age. It took me ages to cover what should be I guess a 20 minute walk to the bowl edge. Yeah yeah yeah....

Well being stubborn I got there and was rewarded with a siting of a hardly known four meter high megalith sitting in a very deep bowl. An incredibly secretive place, absolutely quiet, scented with a rich variety of herbs and what came to mind was speech in Midsummer Night's Dream.” I know a place where the wild thyme blows.... “



The sense of a pagan garden or socially cohesive important place was very powerful. There were signs of small animal tracks and clearly these are what humans follow down to the stone.

Having slid most of the way down the bowl to the stone by grabbing handfuls of esparto grass we use what shade we can obtain by putting our backs to the north of the stone for some rest and contemplation before the climb out. There was a plaque that sid this stone had been found in 1975 would you believe, that the stone probably datedfrom about four or five thousand years ago. Then you start the why questions....

Inevitably the first place to start looking for answers is the computer but there is nothing in English I can find. And almost nothing in Spanish except for one good blog where people have walked in as a club at a more appropriate time of year – like February. A couple of references to the Lorca Museum of Archeology which I have already visited and seen some of the human artifacts found around the Menhir. This is when I look for definitions of the word “garden”. What happens is, the more I look the more I am pushed back in time. I come across the first references to neolithic gardens for heavens sake. I guess we have to take the beginning of horticulture as the beginning of gardens. Then I start to fall over links to all sorts of associations of myths pagan rites statuary and I mentally have to start to close down. No wonder there are now prehistorians who specialise now in gardens. Anyway I think I have made a good enough case here to put up some photos of this special place which feels like some very old socially cohesive garden with statuary.