The topic of gardens in medieval romance is surely well-tilled ground, at once significant and banal. In all the calendars and engagement books that well-meaning friends and relations give us we see how seductive are those familiar pictures of richly colored flowers and spouting fountains, where the pleasures of artful nature are enjoyed and noble lovers meet. E. R. Curtius, Elizabeth Salter and Derek Pearsall, along with many others, have demonstrated the long literary history and rich symbolic content of the hortus conclusus, or locus amoenus, a space which in the Middle Ages was known from classical poetry and Biblical commentary even before it came to be actually imitated in later periods of increasing affluence and social display. Thanks to scholars and critics we have learned that a garden is never simply a space devoted to ornamental plants, but one suffused with meanings, sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting, but seemingly always available, most famously in that foundational text for medieval vernacular poetry, the Roman de la Rose. As Michael Pollan puts it, even biology itself is apparently complicit in this process of troping nature, making of the green world a readable code: