Faith & Reflection: Voices from the Black Church and Beyond
- St Anne's Church launched the charity Kew Theology & Gardening to deepen connections between faith, nature, and climate action.
- The project hosts talks, retreats and major lectures, notably a September lecture by Carmody Grey on gardening and human vocation.
- It complements the Church of England's environmental agenda and the teaching document Hope for All Creation, framing care as core Christian mission.
- A contemplative walk, Stations of the Trees, features a carbon garden, seed reflections, and prayers urging repentance and stewardship.
(RNS) — From the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane, where Mary Magdalene mistook the risen Christ for a gardener, cultivated green spaces have long held a special place in Christianity.
Now, in a corner of west London, an Anglican church is using its proximity to one of the most famous botanical gardens in the world, Kew Gardens, as a reason for a new venture linking theology and nature. St Anne’s Church launched a new charity, Kew Theology & Gardening, to help deepen people’s connection with nature, develop theology of the environment and explore climate change.
The project started small in 2024 with talks for the local community but has since expanded to holding retreats, partly held in Kew Gardens and partly in St Anne’s. Now the charity is hosting major lectures.
The most significant so far will be held this September, when Carmody Grey, professor of integral ecology at Radboud University in the Netherlands and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, will talk on Sept. 30 on “What Are We Here For? Gardening and the Human Vocation” in the garden’s lecture theater.
A previous lecture was given by the then-director of gardens at Kew, Richard Barley, while another future lecture will be given by environmental biologist Martin J. Hodson, a visiting researcher at Oxford Brookes University.
“In Britain gardening is just about the most popular activity there is,” said St Anne’s vicar, Giles Fraser. “People spend so much time with their hands in the soil. It’s how they connect with creation — and the story of creation began in a garden.
“We garden on our knees, we pray on our knees. That’s the image I had in my mind when this started,” he added.
Fraser, who is well-known as a broadcaster in Britain and has just completed a series on church-going for BBC radio, said that his parish was keen to find more ways to connect with its neighbor, Kew Gardens, which is known throughout the world for its research and attracts millions of visitors every year. The connection between St. Anne’s and the gardens, the parish believes, will help people reflect not only on creation but on the environment and threats to it, such as climate change.
The Kew Theology & Gardening project comes at a time when the Church of England is increasing its work on environmental matters. In July, the church published a major teaching document on care for creation called “Hope for All Creation: A Theological Response to the Environmental Crises.”
The document argues that care for creation is not an option but a core part of Christian belief and mission. It sees environmental action as an expression of hope and roots care for the planet in the biblical story of creation, redemption and renewal, structured around the themes “See, Reflect, Respond.”
In their forward to the document, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, and the Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, say that “we inhabit a world groaning with the growing impact of the climate and environmental crises. Their scale is daunting, and the devastation and suffering they bring — to which more and more people are increasingly vulnerable, especially those in poverty — are growing in scale and intensity. We can feel powerless and overwhelmed in the face of these things and our fears for the future.” But they also write, “To care for creation in partnership with others, to show solidarity with the vulnerable, to be prophetic in speech and action on these issues — locally, nationally and globally — is to live out this faith and hope. It is an essential part of following Jesus and sharing the Gospel today.”
The Church of England’s General Synod has also just given approval to a new annual Festival of Creation in Christ to be celebrated in Church of England churches on the first Sunday of September — traditionally a time when churches mark the harvest season, reminding people of both their responsibility for stewarding the earth and to express thankfulness for God’s abundance.
According to Grey, who is preparing her Kew lecture, humanity has two vocations that can be expressed in biblical terms, to be fruitful and multiply and to till and keep — both of which can be expressed through gardening.
“Tilling and keeping and fruitfulness are defining marks of the human life and so are at the core of theological anthropology,” she said. “We have sometimes made too great a difference between beauty and utility, but these two aspects of life show how they are connected. We have children partly for survival but also as an expression of joy. The same is true of gardening — they overlap.”
Grey also expressed concern that people do not appreciate the importance of plant life enough, citing the example of people being shown a photo of animals in a landscape. When asked to point out life in the photo, they almost always indicate the animals, and when shown a photo of a landscape, they almost always say there is nothing there.
“The Bible highlights the importance of all life, including plant life, and the imagery of the tree is a key focus of the Bible,” she said.
Kew Theology & Gardening has devised a walk called Stations of the Trees, based on the Christian devotion of Stations of the Cross, with each station or stopping point in the gardens focusing on a particular aspect of the environmental crisis.
Among the stations is the carbon garden, focusing on the importance of carbon and problems associated with excessive carbon; boards highlighting Kew’s role in collecting seeds, with a reflection on the parable of the sower; and the rose garden, where prayers reminding pilgrims of the rosary are offered to Mary. Also included is a visit to olive trees, representing the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ prayed with foreboding before he was arrested while his disciples slept. Pilgrims are urged to wake up and are given a prayer to say:
On our watch, we reap what we have sown, on our watch, sea levels rise. On our watch forests destroyed, and so now with tears in our eyes we look to you, with regret, with repentance. Knowing the difficult decades that we face, as temperatures rise, as extinctions increase, as we come to terms with our existential plight.
Kew Gardens has backed the Kew Theology & Gardening project. A spokeswoman said: “We are always happy that local communities are encouraging people to think about plants and the planet.”
Kew Gardens and St. Anne’s Church also have historical connections. The Gardens were enriched by George III in the late 18th century, after his mother, Augusta, princess of Wales, expanded the exotic gardens at Kew, and the park was adopted as a national botanic garden in 1840. George III also paid for St. Anne’s Church to be expanded around 1770 and commissioned a private gallery for the royal family to be used when they were in residence at Kew Palace. Several botanist curators of Kew were buried at the church, including Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, director of the gardens, who, with his Kew colleague George Bentham, created the major modern form of plant classification in the 19th century.
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