| You are unlikely these days to find a ploughman homeward plodding his weary way to Stoke Poges, where Thomas Gray wrote his Elegy. Today’s homeward-plodder to this village two miles from Slough is probably a busy executive, his plough a Mercedes, and his furrow the M4. But, just a field away from St Giles’s Church, where in 1750 Gray wrote his lament for the common man, there is still a place “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”. It is called a Quiet Garden. And it has a remarkable story attached to it; a story that combines inspiration, faith, chance… and a divine spark. The inspiration came to Philip Roderick, an Anglican clergyman in the diocese of Oxford, while on pilgrimage to St David’s, in 1974. His vision was for the creation of a network of pilgrim centres in which, just as Christ did with his disciples when he retreated to the Mount of Olives or across the Sea of Galilee, people could get away to a place of peace, beauty and contemplation. The faith was his abiding conviction that, one day, he would find a garden in which his vision could become a reality. The chance was that, 18 years on, a lady called Noreen Cooper bought a house that was too big for her and her husband Geoffrey, confident that a Christian organisation of some kind could make good use of the wing they didn’t need. The divine spark came when Philip and Noreen were brought together, and Quiet Gardens was born. “That was a complete fluke,” said Philip when we met on a glorious afternoon in the grounds of Stoke Park Farm which, in 1992, became the first of what is now a world-wide network of 260 Quiet Gardens. “At the time, I was director of the Chiltern Christian Training Programme. One of my students on a Contemplative Discipleship course I was leading was a hospital visitor, as was Noreen. One day at the hospital the student, who knew of my idea, heard Noreen telling of her certainty that her spare wing would find a worthy cause to occupy it. “She brought the two of us together.” Stoke Park Farm makes a wonderful home for Quiet Gardens. It is a substantial yet homely 17th century red brick house with a sweeping lawn to one side and an orchard to the other. The grounds are used for quiet contemplation, the wing for sessions guided by a guest speaker, and a cluster of former farm outbuildings house the offices, where Jackie Long advises and supports the custodians of the world-wide network of Quiet Gardens. “I have the loveliest view from any office,” she says, showing me the Sequoia - a deciduous and comparatively diminutive relative of the giant redwoods of California - which she can see from her desk. As we stroll around the gardens she and Philip tell me about the programme at this Quiet Garden, which is open to pilgrims one day a week. “A typical day might include time spent in solitude in the garden or on a visit to St Giles,” says Philip. “The pattern of the day alternates between more formal input one week and a more reflective session the next. “The space - the garden - is consecrated for a time by the enabler of the group. God is honoured. “It is different from attempting contemplation or reflection in your own garden, because here you don’t have to worry about the weeds and the clutter, and the spirit can work.” Individual Quiet Gardens are as different as their hosts, their circumstances and their surroundings. They might be in the back yard of a cramped terraced house in an English town, or in a slum in Africa, in retreat centres, churches or the inner city. There are gardens in 18 countries, from Botswana to Brazil, Israel to the USA. “What we do is rooted in the Christian tradition,” says Philip. “Christ took his disciples and walked with them. We can’t go to a mountain or across the lake as Christ did, but we can go into a garden. And if Christ and his disciples needed to get away for contemplation then so do we. Quiet Gardens draw pilgrims from their immediate locality - this one probably from a 15 mile radius - which means that, for everyone to have access to one, we would need about 600,000 of them!” Philip is keen to stress the diversity of Quiet Gardens. “They are as much a concept as a place,” he says. “A few don’t even have what we would recognise as a garden. “I visited the Korogocho slum in Nairobi, where the pastor has a dispensary, a school and, I was told, a Quiet Garden. But there was an open sewer right outside so I asked where the garden was and he said ‘in the heart’.” Philip is still part of the Oxford diocese, and had a parish at Amersham until a year ago. He is funded partly by the diocese and partly by a sponsor, while Quiet Gardens runs on a shoe string, taking donations from the pilgrims it serves. Most quiet gardens are open only at set times – sometimes just a few days a year - but other are available almost all the time. One such is in the grounds of Worth Abbey, near Crawley in West Sussex. A few days after meeting Philip I am standing, on another glorious summer’s afternoon, beside the Worth garden’s cyclamen bed. It recently had a supporting role in the BBC TV series The Monastery, which followed five laymen as they spent 40 days living by the Rule of St Benedict. With me is Fr Patrick Fludder, creator, custodian and chief labourer at Worth’s Quiet Garden. “The producers asked me if I could use six men every afternoon for three weeks,” said Father Patrick. “I’m always glad of labour, and they were filmed clearing the bed. It was deep with bindweed and choked with nettles and it took a lot to clear it.” Inspired by the TV series, and by the profound impact which living by the Rule had on the men, 200 viewers have booked retreats at Worth in the past month, and we are joined by a group of them in the Quiet Garden. Father Patrick asks us to be silent for five minutes, to breathe in the garden and then, if we talk, to talk quietly. He wanders off, tugs at some weeds, sits on a bench – there are several scattered around – and then takes a stroll around the pond which is the focal point of the two-acre garden. This is a cloistered place; sheltered in a deep bowl scooped from the meadow that runs down from the monastery. Screened by copper beeches, oaks and firs, and rich with purple foxgloves, it is a woodland glade in which you are drawn to the soft gleam of the pond water. Beneath the beech at the head of the pond a novice rakes last winter’s leaves. The garden was created in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Worth was a private house, but abandoned in the 1930s. It has taken enormous effort from Father Patrick to restore it. “I first came to the garden 32 years ago,” he told me. “As novices we were sent to clear weeds, and it was absolutely full of nettles, and brambles up to shoulder height. It was tough work clearing them, but I enjoyed it; found it satisfying. “Over the next two to three years I’d come annually and re-clear what had regrown, but then other things called me away and I didn’t have time anymore. “Then, five or six years ago, I was church administrator and found the need to get away from the desk, so I came to bash the weeds again. “At about the same time I discovered the Quiet Gardens movement, and their aims equated with my own concerns. We were developing our retreat centre and I realised that the garden, and quiet contemplation within it, could become an integral part of that.” But this meant that Father Patrick would have to do more than just clear the weeds –he would have to embark on a total restoration. “I discovered, beneath a six inch layer of leaf mould and soil that had built up over 70 years, a network of paths circling the pond, as well as sandstone walls and rockeries around the water, and I set about clearing them. “I had found a couple of articles about the garden, dating from 1897 and 1900, which told me how it had been planted, and I started replanting the broom, berberis, camellias and azaleas that had once been here. The articles also mentioned alpines, but I had no idea which. Then, in the mud on a path, I found half a dozen old lead plant labels which gave the Latin names.” The replanting of the alpines is Father Patrick’s most recent project, and already the freshly-turned soil is being masked with bright blue gentians. Worth’s Quiet Garden is very much a work in progress, but for now it is the current retreat which is calling Father Patrick. As we walk back through the fields to the monastery he tells me: “Our web site is the conduit most of those who saw the TV programme use to find us. We can see which search terms they use, and most popular among them is ‘sanctuary’. “ In Worth’s Quiet Garden, or in any of the other 259 Quiet Gardens around the world, pilgrims will find sanctuary in abundance.
For more information go to www.quietgarden.co.uk | 
