Taken From Singapore Garden Festival Website 2010

Celtic Gardens Wins Gold and the People’s Choice Award at the 2010 Singapore Garden Festival

Hortus Inclusus (The Interior Garden)

This garden named ‘Hortus Inclusus’ was inspired by John’s visits to St. Paul’s Outside of the Walls, in Rome, Italy.  This magnificent major Basilica has nestled within its interior a beautiful cloister.

In monasteries, the word cloister meant the "enclosure.”  Monks would come to the cloister during quiet free times to meditate.  The purpose of the beauty in the cloister was to elevate the heart of the monk, lifting him to the Ultimate Creator of Beauty.  Mendel was in a cloister when he observed different flowers in the sweet-pea patch, and musing upon that led him to think about how God arranged for variation in nature, leading to the discovery of genetics.

Cloisters are the most significant legacy of the ancient world's peristyle gardens.  It cannot be beyond the wit of the modern world to find a new use for such a brilliant garden type.  
The ‘Hortus Inclusus’ cloister garden was fashioned from the timbers of a reclaimed centennial Michigan barn, fieldstone from an 18th Century Pennsylvania wall, and espaliered pear trees trained in the foothills of Tennessee.  To build ‘Hortus Inclusus’ we have borrowed from the past to honor the Eternal.

Our hope was that, upon entering, one would move beyond spectator and enter into the very depths of your heart and soul, and there meet the Ultimate Beauty, ever ancient, ever new.
‘Hortus Inclusus’ was design by John Cullen and built by Celtic Gardens (namely John and Michael Cullen) and Implementing Partner Prince’s Landscape of Singapore.

Mosaic details by Michael Cullen

Fieldstone provide by Flynn Stone Company

Timber Cloister was constructed in Ann Arbor, Michigan by St. Joseph’s Building Company

Timbers came from the Ludwig family farm in Dexter, Michigan