In this garden the olive tree signifies charity, the reed urges obedience, pomegranate is associated with courage and strength and citron with its fragrant essential oils indicates purity and sobriety. Because this garden is not like the others. Each plant has its exact place in it. Like every virtue in the human soul.

This is the garden of virtues, the garden of Paradise, the garden of eden. This is how a rare Byzantine manuscript found in Oxford mentions him. An anonymous 13th century text in particular, describing a garden somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean, real and symbolic at the same time, emphasizing the ambiguous meaning he had for the Byzantine man: spiritual place of virtues and at the same time the tangible reality of a natural oasis.

"The Bible this delight of paradise / to the philomathy psychic he brings, / to the understandings according to mind it contributes". (This book will introduce the studious reader to the charms and graces of a heavenly garden., if he turns his whole thought to it). This is stated in the preface of the manuscript. It was one of the elements that charmed the professor Mrs. Sofia Rizopoulou to bend over him, when he accidentally came to her notice, as he studied botanical texts in Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Fourteen plants of the Mediterranean landscape are associated in the manuscript with a corresponding number of spiritual virtues. Each of them supports a virtue with the aim of all together acting uplifting and healing for the human soul. "With a perceptive eye the anonymous author of the manuscript deciphers the codes of plant life to compose a garden of virtues" says Mrs. Rizopoulou, impressed by the accuracy and vividness of the descriptions, as stated in the small study of the "Garden of Prayer" published by the Philodistry Association of Athens with the Kaleidoscope publishing house.

The nature

“Logs, branches, foliage, flowers and fruits, through the colors, the sounds, the smells, the flavors and the touch of a generous nature compose a unique continuum between the physical and the spiritual" notes Mrs. Rizopoulou, after, as he elaborates below, “the literal is here in excellent balance with the figurative in a particularly favorable approach – even praise – of the physical world through the senses".

There are three Propylaean trees in the garden of the virtues: the cedar, the cypress and the pine. Everything is slow growing and evergreen. And all suggest the ascetic life and temperance: "As for the plants, they always bear fruit during this time, nor bloom, else’ nor do they praise the whole fruit together, nor do they hold together in the end, and have the first, all things being so. Time is everything indeed, according to Solomon" (Just as plants neither bear fruit nor bloom all at the same time, but in each the fruits do not ripen at the same time, nor do the first fruits wait for the last, so here too. There is a right time for everything, as Solomon said).

The theft

The manuscript consists of 34 leaves with 1.100 verses in Greek microscript and is actually the work of two editors, since in the prologue the second refers to the first by adding five plants to the already existing nine.

However, a "stolen" product from the great trip to the East made by the English traveler and mineralogist Edward Daniew Clarke (1768-1822) it was the manuscript. Its exact origin, unknown, after he had visited all the great monasteries, distracting overall 94 volumes, of which the 38 it was in greek. In fact, with a clear conscience, as his reasoning was that he saved the manuscripts from the mice and worms of the monastic libraries and also from the ignorance of the monks, sold them instead 1.000 pounds in the Bodleian Library.

The Paradise

The manuscript is referred to in international literature as a "symbolic garden" or "theoretical paradise". But the word "paradise", derived from ancient Persian pairi-daeza, which meant "grove" or "pleasure garden" (composed of the words "pairi" and "daeza", i.e. "garden" and "wall") denotes an outdoorsman, walled space.

Safe environment, mild climate, water sufficiency, abundance and variety of fruits are the elements that make up Paradise, according to the early Christian understanding, which drew its inspiration from Genesis and from Revelation. Garden tracks anyway, which adorned mansions of the early Christian years, have been identified in many areas of the Middle East and in Istanbul itself, while public parks are often mentioned in written sources, which were created at the expense of the emperor.

"And God planted paradise in Eden towards the east and placed man there, he created, and God sent out of the earth every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, and the tree of life in the midst of paradise, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (Gen. 2, 8-9). A, unique and insurmountable has been man's goal ever since: the search for Paradise. Even if it is not the same for everyone, despite what the Bible says, even if the Paradise of one is opposed to that of another.   

The olive, the fig tree, the pomegranate and the palm

• Vine, mental cheerfulness
• Bramble, obedience
• Olive, alms
• Cedar, Cypress and Pine, abstinence
• Kitrion, purity and sobriety
• Crinon, indigence
• Persia (peach tree), modesty
• Roa (pomegranate), prowess
• Yew (smilangy), knowledge
• Styrax (wet weight), wish, prayer
• Fig, meekness
• Phoenix (the kind of date palm), justice