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 created 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.
Elizabeth was left to look after herself and their child, but she was also determined to raise the money to free her wastrel husband. Elizabeth was extremely resourceful. She spotted a gap in the market for an up-to-date herbal reference work for apothecaries, one that included plants that were newly arriving from North and South America.
Having received art training when she was young, she set herself up in rooms next to the Chelsea Physic Garden, where London’s greatest collection of medicinal botanical species was found at the time. She began to draw its plants and then took the artwork to the debtor’s prison, where her jailed husband could identify and name them in several different languages. Elizabeth didn’t stop there. She engraved the copper plates for printing and hand-coloured each of the printed images: this process normally took three different highly specialised craftspeople. She even engraved the text next to her illustrations. The etchings had to be done in reverse, and Elizabeth Blackwell did it beautifully. It contained 500 images of ‘the most useful plants, which are now used in the practice of physick’.
The book took four years but was a triumph both artistically and as a practical apothecary’s reference book. Elizabeth turned out to be an excellent businesswoman, negotiating deals with booksellers and arranging all the publicity herself. Ultimately, she paid her husband’s debts and he was freed. She had achieved her goal – but prison did not reform her husband. Alexander soon racked up more debts and Elizabeth was forced to sell part of the herbal’s publication rights to raise more money. Alexander then abandoned his family to seek his fortune in Sweden.
Even then, Elizabeth continued to send him his share of the herbal’s royalties, though they never met again. Alexander became embroiled in a political scandal and was executed in 1748, and Elizabeth died ten years later. So this classic of botanical illustration is also a story of doomed love.
And so the three witches and the forlorn knight ventured forth into the enchanted garden, where rare herbs, fruit and flowers grew in abundance on either side of the sunlit paths.
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Another image of a ‘stink lily’ can be found in a botany book that’s known as a ‘magnificent failure’: Robert John Thornton’s Temple of Flora, published in London between 1799 and 1807. His image of the lily has a large dark purple leaf curling and cupping a dramatic spike, which points to a sky full of foreboding thunder clouds as a volcano throws a streak of orange lava into the grey firmament. The book contains twenty-eight highly theatrical paintings of plant life across the world. However, it’s not exactly a scientific work.
The depiction of the dragon arum was typical of the melodramatic backdrops he used to depict his plants, and of the Romantic period in which he lived. The dramatic tableaux resemble more fictionalised paintings than faithful scientific reproductions.
All the images are outstanding artworks, but all of them have an element of the bizarre. There are churches, windmills and Classical temples in the background, and a depiction of a ‘queen plant’ even has Cupid firing an arrow at it. Robert John Thornton came from a wealthy family and intended to go into the clergy, but he switched from the church to medicine and botany. The images represented his passion for plants, as well as his philosophical principles.
Thornton was morally conservative, had fervent religious beliefs, royalist passion and disgust for the French Revolution. He was determined to depict God’s power in all things, and the essence of God within the plants of the natural world. Perhaps this is why he got sidelined by an obsession with the reproduction of plants, with the real title of the work being The New Illustration of the Sexual System of Linnaeus, which was then reduced to The Temple of Flora.
Carl Linnaeus’s binomial system for naming plants was based on their reproductive organs, which was shocking for many people at the time. Linnaeus’s writing was considered pretty racy, with flower leaves that ‘serve as bridal beds which the creator has so gloriously arranged’. As a response, Thornton wanted The Temple of Flora to serve as a symbol of his belief in God’s aim for conjugal fidelity within families, and that reproduction and sexual experience should only take place within marriage. In the process, he definitely got carried away with all the imagery.
Because of his insistence on trying to mix too much symbolism into his book of botany, Thornton tended to lose the meaning of the plants entirely. That’s one of the reasons why it proved a commercial failure, combined with the fact that the higher taxes brought about by the war with France meant that the wealthy Englishmen of the time had less disposable income for such an expensive book. Thornton had inherited a large fortune, but the strange, beautiful book he had created was so expensive to produce that his family was left almost destitute when he died. Ironically, the ‘visually magnificent failure’ is now one of the world’s most sought-after botany books.
‘Careful, Weasley, careful!’ cried Professor Sprout, as the beans burst into bloom before their very eyes.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
PART 3: MANDRAKES AND GNOMES
‘Mandrake, or Mandragora, is a powerful restorative,’ said Hermione, sounding as usual as though she had swallowed the textbook. ‘It is used to return people who have been transfigured or cursed, to their original state.’
‘Excellent. Ten points to Gryffindor,’ said Professor Sprout. ‘The Mandrake forms an essential part of most antidotes. It is also, however, dangerous. Who can tell me why?’
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Until Harry Potter stepped into Hogwarts, most people had forgotten about mandrake plants, but for thousands of years mandrakes were revered, thought to have mysterious properties and sought out as cures for everything from fertility problems to insanity.
Mandrakes are native to the Mediterranean region and the Himalayas, and the mandrake root can often look a lot like a human being, with little arms and legs. The root is where the magic lies.
Instead of roots, a small, muddy and extremely ugly baby popped out of the earth. The leaves were growing right out of his head. He had pale green, mottled skin, and was clearly bawling at the top of his lungs.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
One mandrake root (some three hundred years old) is kept in the collection of the Science Museum in London and it is disturbingly human-like in appearance. It seems to depict a bearded male figure kneeling and clasping a club. It is easy to understand why people believed that mandrakes screamed when they were uprooted.
A Journey Through Potions & Herbology Page 4
