Welcome to
Garden of My Delights!
For the curious, the thoughtful, the boundary-crossers...
Founded on the principle that beauty, wisdom, and creativity are essential to human flourishing, Garden of My Delights serves professionals, lifelong learners, and anyone seeking deeper engagement with the world around them.
I'm Shana. I love the arts and sciences, and I find the classical liberal arts a useful construct for intentionally pursuing knowledge and cultivating creativity.
As Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “…one ought every day at least to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
What is Garden of My Delights?Garden of My Delights is inspired by the Hortus Deliciarum, a medieval illuminated encyclopedia written by Herrad of Landsberg, the abbess of Hohenburg Abbey in Alsace. Compiled as a teaching tool for novices at the convent, it represents a remarkable achievement in interdisciplinary learning and women's scholarship. One of the most famous of its 336 illustrations is titled Philosophia et septem artes liberales, or Philosophy and the Seven Liberal Arts.
The liberal arts were first introduced in Plato’s Republic as the essential skills and fields of knowledge a free person needed to take part in activities of civic life such as public debate or defending oneself in court. The Romans adapted Plato’s initial three subjects, rhetoric, grammar, and logic, into the Trivium and added four others known as the Quadrivium, astronomy, mathematics/arithmetic, geometry, and music. The Trivium are also known as the arts of the word while the Quadrivium are known as the arts of numbers. These fields create a foundation for continual learning throughout one’s life, and in modern times a liberal (arts) education is meant to prepare an individual to adapt to a changing economy, in that a person should be able to reason their way into any field.