Herbal with treatises on food, poisons and remedies, and the properties of stones

The things you can find online (via Twitter). From the 16th century comes the manuscript of  'Giovanni Cadamosto, Herbal with treatises on food, poisons and remedies, and the properties of stones (Peutingerorum Liber Botanicus) (Harley MS 3736)'. As the pictures show the draftsmanship is tremendous but it is also interesting for its position somewhere between the stylization ans conventions of earlier ages with the drive towards naturalism (to draw form nature rather than copy from the ancients).

Wild Plants and the escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy

In her Ilfracombe Journal (May/June 1856) we find George Eliot excitedly botanizing, she saw no plants only vivid ideas; to name the world is to own it. Compare with Gilbert White.

I have talked of the Ilfracombe lanes without describing them, for to describe them one ought to know the names of all the lovely wild flowers that cluster on their banks. Almost every yard of these banks is a "Hunt " picture — a delicious crowding of mosses, and delicate trefoil, and wild strawberries, and ferns great and small. But the crowning beauty of the lanes is the springs that gush out in little recesses by the side of the road — recesses glossy with liverwort and feathery with fern. Sometimes you have the spring when it has grown into a brook, either rushing down a miniature cataract by the lane-side, or flowing gently as a " braided streamlet " across your path. I never before longed so much to know the names of things as during this visit to Ilfracombe. The desire is part of the tendency that is now constantly growing in me to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct vivid ideas. The mere fact of naming an object tends to give definiteness to our conception of it. We have then a sign 'which at once calls up in our minds the distinctive qualities which mark out for us that particular object from all others.

For a decade I have kept a record of the wild plant on two diverse areas

I had completely forgotten about this until I reread it recently. It's from Aldo Leopolds 'Sand County Almanac' (1949). Neighbourhood ecology at its best and the impetus behind my own weeds in my street surveys. 

[O]n week ends my floristic standard of living is that of the backwoods, while on week days I subsist as best as I can on the flora of university farms, the university campus, and the adjoining suburbs. For a decade I have kept, for a pastime, a record of the wild plant species in first bloom on these two diverse areas:

Species First Blooming in	Suburb and Campus	Backward Farm
April	14	26
May	29	59
June	43	70
July	25	56
August	9	14
September	0	1
Total visual diet	120	226

It is apparent that the backward farmer's eye is nearly twice as well fed as the eye of the university student or businessman. Of course neither sees his flora as yet, so we are confronted by the two alternatives already mentioned: either insure the continued blindness of the populace, or examine the question whether we cannot have both progress and plants.

Eye to eye with a Ginkgo tree

 

The existence of the Chinese living fossil ginkgo tree was revealed to me by this excellent article on E360.yale. The ginkgo is a one of a kind tree that from fossil records appears to have survived unchanged for 100 million years. It has acquired a kind of botanical cult status with people hunting for wild specimens in the Middle Kingdom and Dutch teachers running fansites. 

To my surprise the oldest Ginkgo ever planted in Europe is right here in Utrecht, in the Old Hortus. Established in 1723, the Hortus used to be the botanical garden of the university before it got decommissioned in 1987. With shame I must confess I never bothered to visit it but, Ginkgo power!, now I have. The puzzled look by the man working at the entrance gave me the impression that paying visitors are extremely rare, but the year-round pass he sold me for a tenner will certainly not go wasted.   
 
As for the ginkgo: there actually were two of them, the oldest is 250 years old, the youngest 150. The brochure does not give exact dates.

Botany exercises the memory without improving the mind

To The Honourable Daines Barrington

Selborne, June 2, 1778.

Dear Sir,

The standing objection to botany has always been, that it is a pursuit that amuses the fancy and exercises the memory, without improving the mind or advancing any real knowledge: and where the science is carried no farther than a mere systematic classification, the charge is but too true. But the botanist that is desirous of wiping off this aspersion should be by no means content with a list of names; he should study plants philosophically, should investigate the laws of vegetation, should examine the powers and virtues of efficacious herbs, should promote their cultivation; and graft the gardener, the planter, and the husbandman, on the phytologist. Not that system is by any means to be thrown aside; without system the field of nature would be a pathless wilderness: but system should be subservient to, not the main object of, pursuit.

Vegetation is highly worthy of our attention; and in itself is of the utmost consequence to mankind, and productive of many of the greatest comforts and elegancies of life. To plants we owe timber, bread, beer, honey, wine, oil, linen, cotton, etc., what not only strengthens our hearts, and exhilarates our spirits, but what secures from inclemencies of weather and adorns our persons. Man, in his true state of nature, seems to be subsisted by spontaneous vegetation: in middle climes, where grasses prevail, he mixes some animal food with the produce of the field and garden: and it is towards the polar extremes only that, like his kindred bears and wolves, he gorges himself with flesh alone, and is driven, to what hunger has never been known to compel the very beasts, to prey on his own species.* (* See the late Voyages to the South-seas.)

The productions of vegetation have had a vast influence on the commerce of nations, and have been the great promoters of navigation, as may be seen in the articles of sugar, tea, tobacco, opium, ginseng, betel, paper, etc. As every climate has its peculiar produce, our natural wants bring on a mutual intercourse; so that by means of trade each distant part is supplied with the growth of every latitude. But, without the knowledge of plants and their culture, we must have been content with our hips and haws, without enjoying the delicate fruits of India and the salutiferous drugs of Peru.

Instead of examining the minute distinctions of every various species of each obscure genus, the botanist should endeavour to make himself acquainted with those that are useful. You shall see a man readily ascertain every herb of the field, yet hardly know wheat from barley, or at least one sort of wheat or barley from another.

But of all sorts of vegetation the grasses seem to be most neglected; neither the farmer nor the grazier seem to distinguish the annual from the perennial, the hardy from the tender, nor the succulent and nutritive from the dry and juiceless.

The study of grasses would be of great consequence to a northerly and grazing kingdom. The botanist that could improve the sward of the district where he lived would be an useful member of society; to raise a thick turf on a naked soil would be worth volumes of systematic knowledge; and he would be the best commonwealth's man that could occasion the growth of 'two blades of grass where one alone was seen before.'

I am, etc.

An untypical letter from Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (1789). Richard Mabey's biography paints White as an amiable country dumpling, a landlord with little land, a prospected vicar who never managed to become one, a man who arranged his financial security with a few miserly tricks: the portrait of a minor caricature in a Jane Austen novel. White travelled throughout Britain but in the end preferred to stay home, tend his garden and study the plants and birds around Selborne the village where he was born and where he died. The special contribution of his History is that he is the first one to dwell on the simple, mundane things in nature without apology and with complete relish. His book, he wrote only one, is reminding us that we do not see anything out of the ordinary, we already see so much. To use the phrase of Robert Walser.

Earlier posts on Richard Mabey include posts on his forage guide, and his journeys through wasteland ecology.

Serious botany means serious exploration

With the long & loud hurray from a second hand cheapskate I welcomed the arrival of the 1984 book 'Wild plants of Utrecht'. It's old and the data it uses is as much as five years older but it suits my needs perfectly. Not only does it give good descriptions and drawings of 119 common wild plants in the Province (the City of Utrecht names the much larger province of Utrecht) it also has an extensive section on the geological past of the province with explanations on how this effects plant communities. #psychogeophysics 

The above four images show how the plant data was collected. The 1st image shows a grid section of one square kilometre. The 2nd and 3rd image show the route and the location of plants and vegetation. The 4th image shows the presence of one plant per grid section for the entire province. It's a good reminder how things were done before locative media, virtual augmentation reality avant la lettre. A section took two and a half days to map and you can imagine how this works very well to get a deep sense of the place. #psychogeography     

Learn about edible plants with Sturtevant's

'Sturtevant's edible plants' is Victorian ethnocookery listmania in hyperdrive. It is a collection of notes on what plants and what part of plants are eaten where and how. You can take almost any plant, look it up and learn how the Greeks or the Indians used it. The information was collected by US Botanist Sturtevant in the late 19th century but only edited for publication after his death in 1919. It is an outdated collection of lore but a fascinating place filled with all sorts of exotic factoids of interest to contemporary foragers. It is out of print but you can find copies of the Dover reprint, however this book that makes more sense as a searchable PDF. 

Another guide to plants & trees

The most persistent effect of globalization will be biological, not economical. With that in mind my goal is to learn enough to visit some overgrown field or cryptoforest and be able to see it as a floral portmanteau that brings together species from around the world, each telling about a specific story of exploration, travel, management and adaptation. In that effort (on the cheap) I have blindly purchased a 1980 pocket in mint condition for a paltry fifty eurocent. It turns out to be a perfectly structured teaching book for the novice plant spotter. It begins by telling you what to look for (the two middle pictures) and continues with orderly pre-sorted categories that make it easy to look up the name. It is an old book and I have spotted the absence of certain pervasive weeds (Hockweed, Red Valerian, Japanede Knotweed, perhaps indicative of a changed landscape of weeds?) but it will certainly be of use.