One such 12th-century herbal advises those afflicted with snakebite. It recommends Centauria major and Centauria minor – the ‘greater’ and ‘lesser’ centaury – which were plants named after the Ancient Greek centaur Chiron, renowned as a physician and an oracle, too. The Ancient Greek poet Homer described Chiron as the ‘wisest and justest of all the centaurs’. Chiron was also famous for his knowledge of botany, pharmacy and herbology. In this herbal, a beautiful line drawing depicts him handing the herb centaury to Asclepius, the god of medicine and healing. The herb’s healing properties for snakebite were represented in the diagram, as well as beneath the feet of the centaur and the god, as you can see a long snake slithering away.
They had their Herbology exam on Wednesday (other than a small bite from a Fanged Geranium, Harry felt he had done reasonably well) […]
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Another example of a herbal, from around about 1440 and made in Lombardy, has illustrations so rich in their form and decoration that it was clearly made for a very wealthy patron. These illustrations include, among other things, a demon, a mouse, a cat above a corpse in a coffin, a horse castrating itself, an aphrodisiac, a hairy elephant and another man urinating into a pot.
One illustration is of snakeroot, and it’s a beautiful descriptive painting of the plant. Beside it are some of the species’ Latin names – ‘dragontea’, ‘serpentaria’ and ‘viperina’ – which tell of the plant’s ability to cure snakebites. All of these were names for the same plant. There is an image of a hissing green serpent curling around the plant’s root and a snarling dragon with a forked tongue and elaborately knotted tail. More lavish books were made, intended less for use by the original owner than for ostentatious display, as a thing of wonder and magic.
John Gerard’s herbal, also known as the The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, was first published in 1597. It was used by botanists and medical practitioners for over two hundred years.
Even though it bears Gerard’s name, the book was largely based on the work of others – the text was a translation from a Flemish botanist and hundreds of illustrations are from a German work – only sixteen of the 1,800 woodcuts printed inside were original. Even while alive, Gerard was being accused of plagiarism. It was entertainingly written and a huge success, adding in the local colour of Gerard’s observations of his own garden in Holborn, London. The botanical illustrations had all kinds of advice and information: marjoram can help people ‘given to much over-sighing’ and basil ‘taketh away sorrowfulness and maketh a man merry and glad’.
Some of the book’s botany seems pretty off-the-mark to the modern reader. For example, the theory that Barnacle geese didn’t come from eggs but grew on Scotland’s island of Orkney might not stand up to too much questioning! People didn’t know how migration worked, so it’s an understandable hypothesis, testing out how the world might operate.
One of Gerard’s sixteen new woodcuts was the potato – thought to be the earliest published picture of one. The then-strange and newly discovered plant generated plenty of excitement. It was a delicacy that only the rich could afford and there was talk about its potential medicinal uses: one being that carrying a potato in the pocket would cure rheumatism.
The copy of Gerard’s book held by the British Library is full of fascinating annotations written by hand in the margins, much like Harry’s copy of Advanced Potion-Making in Half-Blood Prince. Because the book was principally about describing plants, and not a medical book, the owner added notes about the plants’ medical uses, including mention of jaundice, worms and the like, which seem more detailed than someone using it merely as a home-remedies book. But we’ll never really know the true identity of this mystery person in the margins.
Nobody else was looking. Harry bent low to retrieve the book and, as he did so, he saw something scribbled along the bottom of the back cover in the same small, cramped handwriting as the instructions that had won him his bottle of Felix Felicis, now safely hidden inside a pair of socks in his trunk upstairs.
This Book is the Property of the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry, Ron and Hermione left the castle together, crossed the vegetable patch and made for the greenhouses, where the magical plants were kept.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
There are medical texts throughout history that could happily have sat in Professor Sprout’s greenhouses or on the shelves in Madam Pomfrey’s hospital wing, but probably the most famous herbal medicine book in history is Nicholas Culpeper’s.
Culpeper’s herbal was first published in 1652, in English rather than Latin, to reach a wider audience: there have been over 100 editions and it has never been out of print. It was taken by pilgrims to the New World and was the first medical book published in North America. J.K. Rowling owns two editions: a beautiful copy gifted to her by her publisher Bloomsbury and a well-thumbed second-hand version she used while writing and researching the Harry Potter series. The book provided a comprehensive list of native medicinal herbs, indexed against specific illnesses, and prescribed the most effective forms of treatment and when to take them.
Nicholas Culpeper – botanist, herbalist, physician and astrologer – had an extraordinary life. He was shot during the English Civil War while fighting for the Parliamentarians, his lover was struck dead by lightning as they tried to elope and he was put on trial for witchcraft. He is remembered for being a radical medical revolutionary.
He set up as an apothecary in London, creating potions and medicines based on plants and herbs that could be found in the English countryside. He shared his knowledge of natural remedies freely, putting him into conflict with the College of Physicians. They had a monopoly on practising medicine within the City of London and disliked Culpeper’s interventions.
Culpeper set up just outside the City walls in the Spitalfields area (outside the jurisdiction of the College of Physicians) and worked incredibly hard – seeing up to forty patients in a morning and charging little or no money for it. He pioneered an early kind of free health service.
He was scathing of other physicians’ methods. A lot of their diagnoses relied on examining urine, sometimes without even seeing the patient personally. He wrote that proper investigation ‘is a better way to find the disease than viewing the piss, though a man should view as much piss as the Thames might hold’.
Culpeper advocated natural remedies, but also turned to astrology, believing that the planets could cure different parts of the body: Saturn the spleen, Jupiter the liver and Mars the gall, and, of course, Venus ‘the instruments of Generation’. In doing so, he innovated a form of medical astrology: he listed the types of herbs and plants to be used for certain cures and in turn related those to the stars, to say what time of year or month was best to take them for the best effect. He saw traditional medicinal practices and astrology as intertwined.
Maybe the mix was a little too dangerous, however, because he was accused of witchcraft by a patient who claimed to be wasting away after consulting him, and Culpeper was imprisoned. He was acquitted, but his use of astrology and his antagonism of the medical establishment marked him out as trouble. Unperturbed, he continued his practice and his herbal was published ten years later.
PART 2: FLOWER PRESSING, FLOWER TEMPLES AND STINK LILIES
‘Oh, hello there!’ Lockhart called, beaming around at the assembled students. ‘Just been showing Professor Sprout the right way to doctor a Whomping Willow! But I don’t want you running away with the idea that I’m better at Herbology than she is! I just happen to have met several of these exotic plants on my travels…’
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Flower pressing, or preserving flowers by placing them between sheets of paper and then drying them out by applying a large weight, has been a popular hobby among children and adults alike for centuries. The oldest existing book of dried flowers – or herbarium – was create
d by Gherardo Cibo, who made it while studying at the most advanced botanical garden in Europe, in Bologna, Italy.
In his early years he travelled widely between Rome, Germany, Spain and the Low Countries, but around the year 1540, at the age of 28, Cibo settled in Rocco Contrada, then a flourishing Italian city with a burgeoning academic reputation. Here, he also made a visual diary of his plant-collecting excursions – with superb, and unusual, illustrations. The plants, often in the foreground, tend to dwarf any people set alongside them. The scale is all over the place, as botanists hack at the roots of giant snowdrops, a lily towers over a walled village and a wild peony is the largest plant in a forest with birds flying among its petals.
Cibo was nonetheless praised for his observations and artwork. He was part of a movement in Renaissance botanical science: a period of collecting specimens (in some cases bringing them back home for cultivation), as well as discovering and identifying vast numbers of new species or subspecies of various plants. Cibo is representative of a time when people were trying to find out about the world through scientific discoveries, but when many botanical matters were still misunderstood or not understood at all – a time when science, magic, tradition, mythology and folklore were still very much mixed together.
While Cibo’s quirky illustrations were an exaggeration of the plants he saw in the Italian countryside, the Hortus Eystettensis of the early 17th century is an extraordinary record of a very particular garden: the garden of Eichstätt in Bavaria, Germany.
Commissioned in 1611 by Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, Prince Bishop of Eichstätt, the Hortus Eystettensis is a magnificent catalogue of plants grown in the bishop’s palace garden. It contains the finest botanical drawings of their time and set the standard as to how botanical drawings should be done.
Eichstätt was the first botanical garden in Europe outside Italy and the bishop decided he wanted to record his spectacular garden by publishing a book that included every single species in it – a massive undertaking for a garden with over a thousand plants. It took so long that the bishop died before it was completed. The book was finally published a couple of years later, in 1613, and is sometimes referred to as the Florilegium, which is Latin for ‘a gathering of flowers’.
The man in charge of this huge project was Basilius Besler, a horticulturalist and an apothecary, which meant he understood the plants like a gardener but also knew their medicinal properties. He was effectively the project manager, being neither the writer, nor the artist. Harry may have forgotten the hellebore in his Draught of Peace, but it was well known to Besler, who cultivated several varieties in the garden, one of which was Helleborus niger (black hellebore), used as a medicine since antiquity, although today it is considered a poison.
The book was hugely expensive to produce and there were many wrangles about cost between Besler and the bishop’s diocese, but Besler saw it as a means to make some money! There were two different editions: one was black and white with explanatory text, and cost 35 florins. The other had no text, was hand-coloured and cost an eye-watering 500 florins (over $70,000 or 60,000 Euros in today’s money).
The exorbitant cost of the hand-coloured edition didn’t put off Duke August of Brunswick-Lüneburg, though, who was so impressed that he not only bought the expensive copy for himself, but also further copies for family and friends. Overall, the book was a huge success and enabled Besler to buy himself a large house in a fashionable district of Nuremberg. The house cost 2,500 florins – the price of five coloured copies of his Hortus Eystettensis.
It was clearly a huge aesthetic success, but it is hard to exaggerate the importance of this book in terms of botanical illustrations. Its level of observation was outstanding, but it also captured the medicinal and scientific importance of the plants – all in one magnificent, ground-breaking book.
While Gherardo Cibo might have been busy flower pressing back in 16th-century Italy, 17th-century English botanist John Evelyn took it to a whole new level in his Hortus hyemalis.
Evelyn was someone who involved himself in a vast and varied array of ventures: he kept a diary at the same time as his friend, the world-famous diarist Samuel Pepys; he was a founding member of the Royal Society; wrote an influential pamphlet on the problem of pollution in London; published a seminal paper on forest management and conservation; discussed architecture with Christopher Wren and introduced the word ‘avenue’ into the English landscape. He even brought the first written record of a salad dressing made with olive oil into the UK. Yet flowers and plants seem to have held a special place in his heart.
Evelyn was often described by his contemporaries as ‘a great projector’, which is a term that denotes someone who is pursuing great projects. Evelyn always had a big project on the go, and one of these was to create an encyclopaedic history of gardens and gardening. He spent much of his lifetime compiling this.
He developed his interest in botany, and created the collection, in Padua, Italy, where he took samples from the city’s public botanic garden. As such, it is a very accurate and closely observed book of plants, which is part of the same process as the naming, itemising and categorising involved in his other great project, the encyclopaedic history of gardens (which, like many of Evelyn’s projects, remained unfinished). But, along with others across Europe, he laid the foundations for future generations to explore plants and gardens. Samuel Pepys was impressed, and judged Hortus hyemalis ‘better than any Herball’.
His heart sank. He had not added syrup of hellebore, but had proceeded straight to the fourth line of the instructions after allowing his potion to simmer for seven minutes.
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
For hundreds of years, apothecaries, professors and ardent students continued to press and preserve plants in ‘dried gardens’ (horti sicci) – around the turn of the 18th century, loose-leaf pages became the preferred means for preserving plants and recording their data, allowing for rearrangement and easy comparison.
This also meant that the classification of plants was a big source of debate in the 17th and 18th centuries – plants were often known by their local common name, but that varied in different parts of the world and even different parts of the same country. Botanists used Latin names – but they were long and descriptive and also varied from place to place, or even person to person. In the end, the system developed by Swedish botanist, physician and zoologist Carl Linnaeus was universally adopted. The Linneaus system was a revolutionary taxonomic system and an ordered scientific way of naming things.
It’s known as binomial nomenclature. In other words, it was a ‘two-name system’. There was a genus and a species name. So, for example, Homo is the genus, sapiens the specific name. The same as genus Tyrannosaurus, specific name rex.
In the case of the flower Adonis vernalis, or fake hellebore, the genus is Adonis and the specific name vernalis. The plant contains toxic substances, but the above-ground parts were used in folk medicinal remedies for fever and intestinal worms. It originally takes its Latin name from Adonis in Greek mythology – a mortal man so beautiful that the goddess Aphrodite fell in love with him. When he was killed by a wild boar, Aphrodite wept and her tears transformed into the Pheasant’s-eye’s golden bloom. It is difficult to shake colloquial names for plants, and people still call it ‘Pheasant’s-eye’. However, Linnaeus’s naming system has dominated horticulture for over two hundred years – and in developing it, he used a system of separate specimens on unbound papers.
A beautifully illustrated 19th-century manuscript from China called Du Cao deals in depth with the topic of poisonous and medicinal plants. In it, there is a fascinating plant known as ‘devil’s tongue’ or the ‘voodoo lily’, of the same genus as Titan Arum, which is known as the foulest-smelling plant on the planet. Like Titan Arum, it reeks of rotting carcass.
The left-hand side of one of the pages in Du Cao is covered in Chinese characters, while the right has a superb illustration of the flower. On one such page there’s
a large single leaf with a red interior that collars a single upright purple spike called a spadix. The flower’s Latin name was Amorphophallus konjac. Amorpho means ‘misshapen’ and phallus means ‘penis’…
The plant is still used today in dietary supplements, noodles and exfoliating sponges. The roots of Chinese medicine go back thousands of years; its origins are mythical and the traditional story is that it all started with a fabled ruler, called Shen Nong.
Shen Nong was a ‘divine farmer’: a mythical sage ruler who lived about four to five thousand years ago. He is credited with being the inventor of agriculture and of medicine, and with being the man who dug the first well, encouraging mankind to plough the fields for the first time and transform into an agrarian community. He was meant to have compiled the first book on the subject, the Bencaojing.
The writer of the text on the devil’s tongue in Du Cao is not known, but they were keen to acknowledge the debt they owed to their forebears, quoting previous works which mentioned the plant and emulating the Chinese medicinal tradition.
Lily waited until Petunia was near enough to have a clear view, then held out her palm. The flower sat there, opening and closing its petals, like some bizarre, many-lipped oyster.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
Descriptions of the ‘stink lily’ or, more romantically, ‘dragon arum’, can also be found in Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal, first published in weekly instalments between 1737 and 1739. The book was a labour of love.
When she was twenty-eight, Elizabeth married Alexander Blackwell, whom she was unswervingly loyal to throughout their marriage, despite her feckless husband being nothing but trouble. Chased out of Scotland after falsely claiming he was a doctor, Alexander set up in London as a painter. But he hadn’t served a proper apprenticeship, so he was fined, couldn’t pay the sum and ended up in a debtor’s prison.
A History of Magic- a Journey Through the Hogwarts Curriculum Page 7
