Walafrid (called 'Strabo,' the cross-eyed) was a Swabian-born monk educated at Reichenau under Wettin and at Fulda under Hrabanus Maurus. Brought to the court of Louis the Pious as tutor to the young prince Charles the Bald, he later returned to Reichenau as its abbot from 838 until his death in 849.
His Latin poem Hortulus ('The Little Garden,' c. 842) — 444 hexameter lines on the twenty-three medicinal and culinary plants of his monastery garden, each treated with botanical accuracy and Christian symbolism — is one of the most beloved minor masterpieces of medieval Latin poetry, the foundational text of the Christian monastic garden tradition.
His Visio Wettini (a vision of the afterlife seen by his teacher Wettin), his De Imagine Tetrici (a political poem), and his many letters — including correspondence with Hrabanus Maurus, Hincmar, and Alcuin's successors — make him one of the central literary figures of the Carolingian world. He drowned in the Loire on August 18, 849, while crossing on an embassy from Charles the Bald.