Monsters in the Garden

When you imagine yourself in a garden, what comes to mind? What sights and sounds, what fragrances and feelings? How do you imagine acting within this space, and how does the space act upon you?

As a garden designer, these questions orient my professional life. I ask people what they hope to experience in their garden, and I work backward from there to create a space that can reasonably meet their expectations. Until recently, these questions primarily revolved around style and use. Do you prefer formal or informal elements, indigenous or tropical plants, a garden for sitting, strolling, or simply viewing from the kitchen window? I’d never asked the question that seemed always to be tugging at me, just below the surface: what about the monsters? Who are the monsters in your garden, and how did they get there? How do you suppose they’re interacting with this space, and how do you propose to confront them?

In the wake of so many centuries of physical and spiritual violence, what can a garden offer? I ask this of myself, and I ask it of you: Who are the monsters in the spaces where we dwell? 

These questions burst to the surface in Spring 2023 as I set out to redesign a garden for one of the courtyards at Yale Divinity School. I’d come to New Haven from New York City the year prior, having sold my horticulture firm and entered the M.Div. program at YDS. My plan was to study the ways in which ecological garden design could serve as a form of spiritual care. Soon enough, study led to practice, and this past Spring I brought together a team to install a full redesign of the Labyrinth Garden at YDS.

When I first laid eyes on the 7,000-square-foot space tucked between Marquand Chapel, the library, and the Southeast wing, it consisted of a flattened expanse of lawn and sparse plantings. These encircled the School’s eight-circuit labyrinth, modeled after the 13^th-century original in Chartres, France. This labyrinth, this ancient spiritual technology at the center of the courtyard, captivated me immediately. And so I made a commitment: the garden I’d design around the labyrinth would exist not just to spruce up an underutilized space, but to open a real, tangible dialogue between the YDS community and the land with which we live.

With this in mind, let me introduce you to the monster in our garden. Let’s get to know him. Let’s dig into the earth and get our hands dirty with history.

A Scorned Creature

The archetype of the labyrinth has sprouted up in countless cultures and geographies over thousands of years, but I want to start with an ancient story, the (in)famous Greek labyrinth myth. On the island of Crete lives the ambitious, arrogant, all-too-recognizable King Minos. The gods have given Minos a bull to sacrifice in their honor, but the king fails to take action. Predictably, there are consequences—in an act of divine retribution, the gods trick Minos’ wife into falling in love with the sacrificial bull, and the two produce a love child: the Minotaur. With the body of a human and the head of a bull, this monstrous child is immediately regarded as a freak and a liability to the family. Minos orders the scorned creature to be caged in the center of an underground labyrinth, feeding him human sacrifices and stoking his anger with no hope for freedom.

Eventually, a young Athenian named Theseus comes to Crete to slay the Minotaur. Having fallen in love with Minos’ daughter, Ariadne, and gained her strategic support, Theseus storms the labyrinth and fells the beast. “What a hero!” we might hear the community chanting. The story continues from there, but let’s pause and enter into this narrative ourselves for a moment.

Imagine walking into the labyrinth like Theseus—except, instead of the mythological site, you’re entering the spiritual labyrinth of your inner self. This is what we do when we walk the physical labyrinth as a tool of meditation, taking our own hero’s journey through prayer or mindful concentration into the depths of our hearts. It can be exciting in there, and also quite scary: we don’t know what we’ll find when we dive deep. We hope that we’ll be able to access the beauty within, what Catholic theologian Matthew Fox might refer to as our “original blessings.” But we also fear the monsters. We wonder about the Minotaurs in the labyrinths of our hearts, the parts of ourselves that have been maligned, isolated, and denied in our public-facing lives. Untended, unresolved, these parts of ourselves often manifest as shame, depression, anxiety, or rage—creating unhealthy response patterns that exaggerate, rather than alleviate, their initial injury. These monsters can be hard to look at, let alone care for.

A Little Tenderness

As you’ll remember, the Minotaur of the myth is the son of the queen and the half-brother of Ariadne. He’s the child of an extramarital love affair, with the obvious traits of his biological dad to prove it. But that hardly makes him sinister. He’s just someone that his family doesn’t want him to be, and so they throw him in the dark, say nasty things about him in public, and cheer his death. Maybe the ferocious Minotaur isn’t upset because he wants to hurt us, but because we’ve hurt him.

So here’s the twist. What if the Minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth, the thing we’re so afraid of and that we want to banish, is not a site of threat, but a site of pain? What if the monster in the center of our hearts is simply an inflamed pain point, and our job in journeying deep inside like Theseus is not to cause further harm, but to heal? In short: What if we entered the labyrinth with a little tenderness?

As I walked the YDS labyrinth with this story in mind, I began to redirect my focus from my inner landscape to the landscape of the earth—not “The Earth” as a concept but the actual earth in the actual courtyard where I was actually walking. If we can apply the metaphor of the Minotaur to our very real and embodied spiritual journeys, can we also apply this metaphor to the very real and embodied spiritual trajectory of the land? What secrets does the land hold? What beauty and horror has it witnessed? What pain does it live with? What joy? And can we, by traveling deep into its experience, help it to find wholeness? Can we, by learning what this land has been through, offer it a little tenderness?

A Harrowing History

Like any good student, I took these questions and headed for the library, the city clerk’s office, the New Haven Museum, and anywhere else I could learn about the history of the land. This research, along with hours and hours of simply sitting in the courtyard quietly paying attention, was my way of listening to the land—of going inside it and building a relationship with it. I wanted to meet its Minotaur so that I could design a garden that would address its particular needs.

So, what has the land of our beloved YDS been through? Well … a lot. Its current life cycle began with the recession of the last glaciers about 15,000 years ago. Once the ice ebbed north, this part of the continent became dominated by mixed hardwood and conifer forests, with dominant trees including hemlocks and white pine, oaks and maples, beeches, and, until the latter part of the 20^th century, chestnuts and elms. The chestnut and elm populations that were once dominant in the Eastern United States have been all but decimated by fungal diseases introduced to this continent through international commerce. Meanwhile, hemlocks are in major decline due to the prodigious woolly adelgid, and beech leaf disease has been spreading quite rapidly around here in recent years. The indigenous forests, to say the least, have been struggling.

In Connecticut, the earliest records of human settlement, according to historian John Menta, go back at least 8,000 years.[1] The formation of the Quinnipiac tribe as a discrete group in the New Haven region likely occurred around 1,000 years ago, though much of this information is difficult to confirm precisely.

According to modern estimates, the Quinnipiac numbered in the thousands before European contact—exact numbers are impossible to know, given the wide-ranging illness and death the community experienced upon contact with European settlers. They traded with the Dutch in the earliest years of the 1600s, and by the 1630s they were hit with twin epidemics of European diseases—smallpox and bubonic plague—along with a neighboring war between the British and Pequot. By the time the British arrived to colonize New Haven in 1637, there were only a few hundred Quinnipiac remaining in the area.

In 1638, Quinnipiac representatives signed over most of their lands and rights to the British settlers in a document that is preserved at the Connecticut State Library. This contract is a case study in extortion, and an embarrassment especially to those of us—including me, a white cis-man going tuition-free to one of the nation’s fancier universities—who benefit from the swindle’s guarantees. In stark contrast: in return for the vast majority of their land and rights, the Quinnipiac were given a paltry sum of textiles, silverware, and munitions. By the end of the 18th century, most remaining Quinnipiac joined the neighboring Tunxis tribe and relocated to Wisconsin with the Brothertown Indian Nation. Today it is nearly impossible to find native Quinnipiac representation in Connecticut.

Prospecting Prospect Avenue

Our YDS property was part of the original land grab by the British, set aside by New Haven as open space while the city began to grow downtown. After the Civil War, Oliver Winchester bought this parcel and built a mansion on it that looked like a carbon copy of Betts House next door. Winchester was president of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and was made famous for creating the “Gun that Won the West,” the 19^th-century rifle of choice as the American imperial project moved West. Among countless other atrocities, this was the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the introduction of Indian boarding schools, and the Dawes Act that broke up Native American reservations into individual allotments. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Native Americans were killed in the late 19th century due to state-sanctioned and culturally celebrated violence, much of which was made possible by a weapons manufacturer who lived on the land where my classmates and I now study liberation theology and restorative justice.

When Winchester died in 1887, property records show that the land atop Prospect Hill was given to his son-in-law for $1, and in 1931 given to Yale for the same price. In 1932 the Sterling Divinity Quadrangle was built on the site of 409 Prospect St., funded by money given to the University from the 1918 will of corporate lawyer John W. Sterling B.A. 1864, who lived in New York City with his life partner and president of the New York Cotton Exchange, James Bloss. With Sterling and Bloss, we introduce the haunting specter of Reconstruction and Jim Crow economics into our garden’s history.

The point of this crash course through the past is simply to say: this land has a history, and it is a history that includes a harrowing degree of harm. On this one tiny piece of land we witness a panorama of American violence—from settler-colonialism to unregulated arms dealing; white Christian nationalism to Native genocide; corrosive ideologies of anti-Blackness to investment structures supporting oppression at home and abroad.

Re-enter the Minotaur

So we return to the Minotaur. Who is the Minotaur in the history of this land? If we remember that the Minotaur is the one who has been maligned and isolated, the one who has been forced to live against his own nature, then we recognize that the land itself is the forsaken Minotaur. Just as the monster inside of our hearts is in fact a part of us, the monster inside the heart of the land is in fact the land, a land whose people, plants, and animals have been thoroughly upended for hundreds of years. How is the traumatized Minotaur of this land doing?

The landscape that I walked into when I first entered this courtyard was marked by absence. The Indigenous peoples whose homeland I now stood in had long been expelled in the most horrific of ways. There were no chestnut or elm trees. There was little by way of bird or pollinator activity: the courtyard had the horticultural complexity of a parking lot. And there was little by way of soil quality, the land having been compacted with construction debris such that water and nutrient cycling was severely compromised over many decades. As I dug in the soil, the smell of sewage signaled anaerobic decay. I pulled out bricks that had been tossed aside a century ago; kept an eye out for glass bottles and shards.

And I kept digging. My team, led by the remarkable horticulturist Burr Johnson, replaced the lawn grass, whose roots were only a few inches deep, with a native long-stem species called switchgrass. The roots of switchgrass will eventually extend many feet below the surface, helping to break apart construction fill that has been in this earth for nearly a century, aerate the soil, sequester carbon, improve water and nutrient exchange, and create rich habitat for the invertebrates, arthropods, and mycelial networks that run the underground world.

Gardening on Stolen Land

As below, so above. Where the original garden was made up of barely a dozen species of plants, today the space is filled with over five dozen species of plants. Almost all of these are indigenous to the Eastern United States and thus ideally synchronized to the food and housing needs of our local flora and fauna.

Take, for example, the mighty oak. Our team planted three oak trees in the garden which, at maturity, can provide nesting sites for dozens of species of birds; calorie-dense food for squirrels, chipmunks, and other mammals; and habitat for an explosion of beneficial insect species that we depend on to pollinate our forests and feed our wildlife. These pollinators fly from the oaks down into the ground-level perennial matrix that is saturated with hundreds of plants, and then back up into the mixed shrub borders that flower throughout all four seasons. With this garden, we’ve significantly increased the amount of public housing and food security for the non-human community in our neighborhood, all the while filtering our air and providing a horticulturally therapeutic space for the human community.

In addition to the garden on-site, we did our best to consider pain points in the supply chain. We purchased plants and other products from independently run local nurseries whose ethical and ecological values we trust. To assist with planting, we hired a crew from the New Haven non-profit Emerge, which assists formerly incarcerated people in finding meaningful work. Our bird bath is a lichen-covered granite boulder from New England that was carved out, by hand, by a friend and local stonemason. Our aim for this garden was to replace absence with knowledge and care—in the design, in the procurement of plants and materials, and in the act of putting it all together.

There’s movement in the garden now, a kind of living energy that feels new and exciting, if also ancient and enduring. I see robins and catbirds flitting from tree to tree; monarchs and swallowtails drifting through the dappled light. I see people sitting, walking, meditating, and meeting in groups in the garden. The ecological health of this place is improving before our eyes.

Even so, if I’m honest with you, this garden feels both like a dynamic ecological success and, at the same time, a heartbreaking reminder of all that we—or certainly I—cannot do. After all, at the end of the day I am a white man gardening on stolen land. What does this mean? What are the spiritual and political implications of this project? In the wake of so many centuries of physical and spiritual violence, what can a garden offer? I ask this of myself, and I ask it of you: Who are the monsters in the spaces where we dwell? How can we reckon with them, personally and collectively, privately and publicly?

The monsters in our land, and our lives, continue to speak. Can we, in all of our sacred spaces, learn to listen?

Chris Freimuth ’25 M.Div. is a horticulturist, designer, and founder of CF GARDENS, a garden design/build firm based in New York City and Connecticut. His focus at YDS is on the intersection of horticulture, design, and spiritual care for the people and land with which he works.