ALTHOUGH IMAGES OF distributive diagrammatic trees, such as trees of virtues and vices, trees of Jesse, and trees of knowledge from the liberal arts, are omnipresent in the meditative imaginary of the late Middle Ages, they are not the only exegetical tools and mnemotechnic devices to use the model of a tree to guide the faithful on the path of wisdom (Fig. 6.1). Other structures that played an essential role in meditation, exegesis, and the recollection of Scripture from the thirteenth century onwards were vegetal and/or arboreal areas such as forests and orchards. These places are characterised by large numbers of trees, and when used as a mnemotechnic device they describe, by analogy, the organisational activity of the mind. Indeed, in a similar manner to the trees of the forest, which are thinned for humans to find their bearings more easily as they traverse it, and planted for their produce, so too must the individual who desires knowledge clear her mind and cultivate her memory in order to gain new knowledge and remember Scripture. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, forests and orchards had close lexical, imaginary, and metaphorical links with other places where plants grow, such as meadows and gardens. While neither the meadow nor the garden is, strictly speaking, an area containing a significant number of trees, in the Middle Ages an area described as a ‘meadow’ could also refer, by extension, to an orchard. On the one hand a meadow is, by definition, a place where no trees grow: the only trees that come into contact with meadows are those that mark their boundaries, i.e. hedgerows. On the other hand, the garden, whose definition varies from one context and period to another, is characterised by the coexistence of several kinds of plants that are not necessarily trees.

Among the areas covered by tree canopy, the orchard occupies an intermediate position between the garden and the forest. Unlike a forest, an orchard does not consist of trees that have grown naturally according to an ordo determined by the Creator, rather it is the consequence of human intervention, which aims at optimising nature's generative power.