A significant number of modern medieval gardens have been, and are being, established in England, on the Continent, and in the United States. Recreated medieval gardens can embody the allegorical gardens of art and literature and give substance to the symbolic plants that flourished in them. They may be used as settings for readings, performances and celebrations, as laboratories for exploring craft traditions, as sources for medieval foodstuffs, and as aids in identifying the medicinal plants found in herbals and receptaria, or the flora of medieval tapestries and Books of Hours. In Paris, in 2000, the Musée National du Moyen Age installed a Jardin Médiéval at the Hôtel de Cluny, the grounds of which include a potager, a garden of medicinal simples, a garden of love, and a celestial garden of Marian flowers, as well as plantings based on the famous millefleurs tapestries in the collection. Planted with medieval species, these gardens are frankly acknowledged by the museum to be neither a reproduction nor a pastiche of medieval gardens, but contemporary gardens inspired by the Middle Ages.

Aside from such recreated gardens made primarily for educational purposes, private owners of medieval estates in England and France are researching and designing gardens for their properties. Many of these projects too are recreations rather than restorations or reconstructions, and vary widely in their commitment to historical accuracy, although archaeological investigations of medieval garden sites are being assiduously conducted in academic contexts.

Dr Sylvia Landsberg, whose book Medieval Gardens is both a historical summary and a practical guide, has recreated a late thirteenth-century royal herber at Winchester Castle, a yeoman’s kitchen garden for Bayleaf (a fifteenth-century Kentish house moved from its original site to the Weald and Downland Museum), and a fifteenth-century nobleman’s pleasure garden at Tretower Court in Wales. The Medieval Garden at The Pennsylvania State University was conceived in 1999 as an extension of the Center for Medieval Studies’ commitment to the inter-disciplinary study of agriculture and landscape. It includes a kitchen garden, a pleasure ground, and a contemplation garden installed in the spring of 2001. An exhibition ground of medieval field crops and an orchard of twenty-five sorts of medieval fruit were added in 2003.