The Geistliches Blumengärtlein: A Devotional Classic in English at Last

By Jarred Fenlason · Encounter Press

The Geistliches Blumengärtlein inniger Seelen — "The Spiritual Flower Garden of Inward Souls" — is the devotional masterpiece of the German Reformed mystic Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769). First published in 1729 and enlarged through successive editions during Tersteegen's lifetime, it became one of the most beloved devotional books in the German language, reprinted continually for two centuries and carried in the baggage of German emigrants across the world.

What Is in the Flower Garden?

The Blumengärtlein is not a treatise but a garden — hundreds of short pieces meant to be picked one at a time and pondered slowly:

• Short, edifying verse — epigrammatic rhymed couplets and stanzas that compress a whole spirituality into a few lines;
• Meditations and spiritual verses — longer poems of contemplation on God's presence, the inward life, and the way of surrender;
• Spiritual hymns — including some of the most enduring hymns of the German tradition; and
• The Devout Man's Lottery — a beloved appendix of Scripture texts and verses designed to be drawn at random, so that an ordinary moment could become an occasion for hearing God.

The whole collection breathes Tersteegen's central conviction: that God is present, and that the soul willing to grow still and yielded may live in that presence continually.

Influence

For generations of readers in the Rhineland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and later North America, the Blumengärtlein sat beside the Bible on the shelf. Its hymns entered the hymnals of many traditions, and individual verses crossed into English through translators from John Wesley onward. Yet the book as a whole — its full architecture of verse, meditation, hymn, and lottery — remained inaccessible to English readers.

The First Complete English Translation

For nearly three hundred years, only selections and individual hymns from the Blumengärtlein appeared in English. The Spiritual Flower Garden, translated and edited by Jarred Fenlason and published by Encounter Press, is the first complete English translation of the work — all of its books, hymns, devotions, and the Devout Man's Lottery, rendered for contemporary readers.

The complete work is available as a single 723-page eBook, and in a large-print edition of two print volumes: Volume I (Books I & II — short and edifying verse, meditations and spiritual verses) and Volume II (Book III and the Devout Man's Lottery — spiritual hymns, devotions, and maxims).