A big mandrake root was highly prized. If you put it under your pillow, it was supposed to help fertility. When mixed with wine it was an anaesthetic and could also cure earache and gout. Carrying mandrake in your pocket brought you luck and gave you the power to influence others. Back in the 16th century, fake mandrakes were sold for huge prices by con artists. But mandrakes are in fact toxic: they are a member of the deadly nightshade family and contain highly poisonous compounds. They can numb pain but can also put you in a coma or lead to asphyxiation, never mind the associated hyperactivity and hallucinations.
A mandrake couple appear in a 14th-century Arabic manuscript version of a book called De materia medica (‘On Medical Material’), originally written in Greek by Pedanius Dioscorides, a botanist and pharmacologist who worked in the Roman army, in the 1st century AD. The translation is typical of the flow of knowledge into modern Western culture from the Ancient World, particularly with Roman, Greek and Arabic influences.
Dioscorides’ work is in five volumes and covers about six hundred plants, alongside some animals and minerals – he describes how you can make around a thousand medicines from these. It was widely read for 1,500 years, and the dozens of surviving copies suggest that the book was copied many times and had a practical use for a long time.
The Arabic version only covers books three and four of De materia medica, but the manuscript has 287 illustrations of plants, together with blank spaces for a further 52 illustrations. One of the illustrations is of the male and female mandrake. Unlike in some other illustrations of mandrakes, the roots do not have human heads – they look like plants. But each root has four ‘branches’, which look like two arms and two legs; half a dozen green leaves sprout from their ‘heads’. Tempting as it might be to call these a ‘mandrake’ and a ‘womandrake’, that would be inaccurate, since there aren’t two sexes of mandrake; modern botanists have identified these as being different subspecies of a mandrake, both native to the Mediterranean.
Hermione’s hand narrowly missed Harry’s glasses as it shot up again.
‘The cry of the Mandrake is fatal to anyone who hears it,’ she said promptly.
‘Precisely. Take another ten points,’ said Professor Sprout. ‘Now, the Mandrakes we have here are still very young.’
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Now it’s clear what a mandrake does, how do we go about getting one? Luckily, there’s a manuscript to tell us, with a marvellous illustration of a complicated way to harvest a mandrake, in Giovanni Cadamosto’s Illustrated Herbal, made in Italy or Germany in the 15th century.
As we know from Harry Potter, harvesting a mandrake is a tricky business.
‘Everyone take a pair of earmuffs,’ said Professor Sprout.
There was a scramble as everyone tried to seize a pair that wasn’t pink and fluffy.
‘When I tell you to put them on, make sure your ears are completely covered,’ said Professor Sprout. ‘When it is safe to remove them, I will give you the thumbs-up. Right – earmuffs on.’
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
People knew the dangers of hearing the cries of the mandrake. The illustration in Cadamosto’s herbal didn’t contain magic earmuffs but revealed a ritual that would fit right in to a Hogwarts Herbology lesson. It’s a strange process involving a dog, an ivory stake, a rope, a horn and earth-filled ears. The earth in the ears prevented the man attempting to harvest the mandrake from being affected by its scream. The mandrake, or Mandragora, was depicted naked with long hair and a beard, with leaves springing out of his head. The rope was attached to one end of the mandrake and the other end of the rope to a dog. At the sound of the harvester’s horn, the dog would be startled and bolt, dragging the mandrake out of the ground with him. The horn and earth combined should protect the ears of the man so he doesn’t hear the screams of the mandrake at all.
This basic method of harvesting a mandrake was common knowledge, though some believed that demons lived in mandrake roots and that hearing their scream wouldn’t just kill you, but send you straight to hell. Others thought the sound would drive you insane. In most cases it was said that the poor old dog, forced to hear the mandrake’s shrieks, died.
These harvesting stories might have been put about by professional mandrake collectors to scare off their rivals because the mandrakes were so precious. It’s certainly true that myth, magic and mandrakes belong together more than with any other plant. Cold comfort, perhaps, to the patients in the Middle Ages who were administered mandrakes as an anaesthetic during amputations.
Just how the myths of the dangers associated with mandrakes persisted, when people had been pulling them up for centuries without any harm coming to them, is a mystery. But it’s most likely that the hallucinogenic properties of the plants and its human shape got minds racing.
‘How few wizards realise just how much we can learn from the wise little gnomes – or, to give them their correct name, the Gernumbli gardensi.’
‘Ours do know a lot of excellent swear words,’ said Ron, ‘but I think Fred and George taught them those.’
Xenophilius Lovegood – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
In the wizarding world, gnomes are pests that get swiftly out of hand if left unchecked. But a catalogue from the Ludwig Möller Garden Company of Germany, back in 1897, depicts an array of gnomes that Muggles were happy to welcome into their gardens.
As early as the Renaissance, a Swiss alchemist, Paracelsus, wrote of ‘diminutive figures two spans in height who did not like to mix with humans’, while at the same time garishly painted metre-high figures were often placed in wealthy people’s gardens. By the 18th century, gnome-like statues called ‘house dwarfs’ were popular.
In the 1870s, a company called Griebel started to produce gnomes based on existing local myths: legendary magical gnomes that were said to live underground during the day, guarding their treasure. Only at night would they emerge. But if they were caught in the sun, they’d turn to stone: the original garden gnome statue.
The Ludwig Möller catalogue displays the type of gnome advertised in the late 1800s: a selection of cheerful, bearded men in red hats smoking pipes, holding garden tools, even caring for a hare. Garden gnomes spread rapidly throughout Germany before running amok in France and Italy.
They had only gone a few paces when Hermione’s bandy-legged ginger cat, Crookshanks, came pelting out of the garden, bottle-brush tail held high in the air, chasing what looked like a muddy potato on legs. Harry recognised it instantly as a gnome. Barely ten inches high, its horny little feet pattered very fast as it sprinted across the yard and dived headlong into one of the Wellington boots that lay scattered around the door. Harry could hear the gnome giggling madly as Crookshanks inserted a paw into the boot, trying to reach it.
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Production of gnomes continues to this day in August Heissner’s business in Gräfenroda, Germany. Heissner is often credited as the inventor of the garden gnome. A typical late-19th-century gnome from one of the workshops there would have had all the traits we now associate with them: from a beard through to lederhosen and a fishing rod. This is how Ron describes the craze for Muggles owning such garden gnomes:
‘Yeah, I’ve seen those things they think are gnomes,’ said Ron, bent double with his head in a peony bush, ‘like fat little Santa Clauses with fishing rods...’
There was a violent scuffling noise, the peony bush shuddered, and Ron straightened up. ‘This is a gnome,’ he said grimly.
‘Gerroff me! Gerroff me!’ squealed the gnome.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
The first gnomes to come to the UK were brought over by Sir Charles Isham who, in the middle of the 19th century, bought twenty-one German terracotta gnomes, made by Philip Griebel – also based in the gnome-manufacturing heartland of Gräfenroda – and took them to his large gardens in Northamptonshire.
Isham was a rich eccentric who spent a lot
of his time and money creating a huge alpine garden at his home. He personally created a rocky landscape of small caves and crevices. There were dramatic slopes, divided by cascades of rocks that artfully tumbled down into a chasm. And in this dramatic scene the gnomes roamed freely.
So, depending on your point of view, Sir Charles Isham is either the champion of the garden gnome and responsible for their popularity in gardens throughout the UK, or the man to blame for tacky garden statues that ruin perfectly respectable neighbourhoods. It’s fair to say, gnomes divide people.
On the one hand they are incredibly popular – it’s estimated that there are around five million merry little garden gnomes in the UK. On the other hand, the divisive little characters have been banned from the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show in London.
Similarly, in Germany, home of the gnome, there’s a happy, thriving population of 25 million. But in the 1960s in gnome-central, Gräfenroda, gnome production was banned for a time. The East German authorities felt gnomes ‘didn’t fit into a socialist society’.
Who wouldn’t want a little humanoid living under their bushes and looking after their house and garden? Whether in a huge garden or a tiny window box, a garden gnome is a magical creature anyone can take care of.
Down the centuries, plants were used for medicine as much as they were for myth-making and magic. Harry Potter might have forgotten to add hellebore to his Draught of Peace, but the proliferation of herbals in the 17th century and beyond ensured that the properties of the plants were understood very widely. Botanical books were often labours of love – literally so in the case of Elizabeth Blackwell’s – and often of rigorous study, such as the one based o nthe garden of the Bishop of Eichstätt. Some depictions of plants were highly accurate and scientific, while others veered into the Romantic, only demonstrating all the more the grip they had on the creative imagination of people in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Botany is a fascination that endures – even if we don’t rely on plants like we used to for medicinal purposes, they are still used the world over. But while some pesky creatures associated with herbology, like the gnomes of the wizarding world, still sit in our gardens, mandrakes had long receded in our memories before the Harry Potter stories brought them back into popular consciousness.
Herbology was, historically, an area of study for the rich but was also essential to the poor. For Harry, it is a subject which has a bearing on some of his key decisions – and mistakes. Pomona Sprout was named for the Roman goddess of abundance, and Herbology lessons certainly prove fruitful for Harry, Ron and Hermione.
ALSO FROM POTTERMORE PUBLISHING
EBOOKS
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (UK English)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (US English)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
HOGWARTS LIBRARY BOOKS
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
Quidditch Through the Ages
The Tales of Beedle the Bard
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Harry Potter and the Cursed Child – Parts One and Two: The Official Playscript of the Original West End Production
Based on an original story by J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany and Jack Thorne
A play by Jack Thorne
Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay
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Harry Potter: A History of Magic
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[Kindle in Motion] (UK English)
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (UK English)
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (US English)
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows
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This digital edition published by Pottermore Publishing in 2019
This book is inspired by the British Library exhibition
Harry Potter: A History of Magic.
J.K. Rowling illustrations, images, manuscript pages and Harry Potter quotes © J.K. Rowling
Text and design © Pottermore Publishing, 2019
Illustrations by Rohan Daniel Eason © Pottermore Publishing, 2019
The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted.
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ISBN 978-1-78110-614-3
A Journey Through Potions & Herbology Page 5
