Mnemonic

by Theresa Kishkan

  Sometimes an image falls into your hands and becomes part of your thinking. You cannot see anything else (or so it seems) without the knowledge of this image. I have always read botanical texts of one sort or another and have viewed hundreds of pictures of trees, flowers, the root systems of grass. All of them have been interesting and some of them instructive. The before and after pollination pictures of fawn lilies, for instance — the demure tepals nodding, then turned back after being fertilized by bees or other insects: a sign to say “no nectar; don’t bother.” I had simply thought the turned-back tepals were a sign of maturity — and in some ways that’s exactly right. The language of flowers is as provocative as any other kind of body language.

  The image I am thinking of now is of two pines, one of them hung with cones, from the Carrara Herbal, a parchment codex made in the very last years of the fourteenth century in Padua. I encountered the illustration in Anna Pavord’s The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants. It’s a marvellous book, taking the reader from Theophrastus (c.372 BC-287 BC) through to the seventeenth-century British flora of John Ray, providing a history of the development of botanical nomenclature. I was familiar with some of the plantsmen, illustrators, and herbalists who form the cast of characters in Pavord’s book, but others were utterly new to me, and I confess I fell in love with the anonymous artist who illustrated Jacopo Filippino’s text for Francesco Carrara, the last lord of independent Padua. This text is an Italian translation of a medical-botanical treatise, The Book of Simple Medicine, written in the twelfth century by an Arab physician, Serapion the Younger. The Arabic treatise is very close in content to De materia medica by Pedanios Dioscorides, written in Greek but known by its Latin title, compiled just as the first millennium turned.

  My Italian is minimal, though I have a grammar and a dictionary and can puzzle through short passages with some understanding. However, Jacopo’s translation is an archaic Paduan dialect. There is a commentary3 on the Herbal, in contemporary Italian, and I have some of this to consult: pages photocopied by a son with access to the one copy in university library holdings in Canada (the University of Alberta).

  Art historian Sarah Rozalja Kyle, who specializes in the Carrara Herbal, has been very helpful: she directed me to De materia medica by Dioscorides, knowing how close the two texts were, particularly the entries on pines, and knowing that De materia medica is more easily available in English translation. So I do have some sense of the relationship between text and image in this work. Back to the commentary on the Herbal: the entry on pines is intriguing. Like Dioscorides, Serapion (via Jacopo Filippino) tells us that the bark can be pounded finely and used in the treatment of boils. Decoctions of inner wood are used for painful teeth and uterine disorders. The wood itself seems to have been made into pessaries to hold a prolapsed uterus in place or to prevent incontinence. (How times change, and don’t change! Pessaries are now made of plastic or rubber or silicone, but serve the same function. I assume that pine was used because the antibiotic qualities of the resins helped prevent infections.) I learned that pine cones are useful also for urinary problems and the corruption of the humours.

  Reading this material is a window into another time, when plants were an important part of healing, a window that also acts as a hinge between what was known before that and what we know now. I mean by this that Dioscorides and Serapion took a leap forward from Theophrastus, also discussed in Pavord’s book, and who impresses the reader with his keen powers of observation. He wrote many works but only two of those concerned with botany survive, Historia plantarum and De causis plantarum, written sometime around 300 BC but pretty much forgotten until translated into Latin in the thirteenth century. A Greek from Lesbos, Theophrastus worked hard on a system of classification, of plant structures, and reproduction but he didn’t understand the mysteries of pollination. When he describes the catkins of filberts, you want to nudge him that little distance to realize what was happening that allowed nuts to form. (He knew that something occurred when the spathe of the male date palm was shaken over the flower of the female. But he didn’t actually know what this had to do with the formation of fruit. And who can blame him? It’s not as though all that people came to learn over the next twenty-three hundred years was available to him. And how many people now could readily write so attentively of filbert catkins? “The filbert after casting its fruit produces its clustering growth . . . several of these grow from one stalk, and some call them catkins.”4) So I’m quite fascinated to read the texts that build on that body of knowledge handed down by Theophrastus, texts which accommodate more specific observation about cause and effect, hypothesis and proof: in short what we know as science.

  But really it’s the gouache portrait of the two pines that I love most in Anna Pavord’s book. The artist has outlined with green pigment and then delicately painted on the foliage, even cones on the tree on the left. Grass grows delicately beneath, each tussock articulated as individual and discrete.

  There are other portraits in this codex that are ravishingly beautiful. A leafy melon plant with a single opulent fruit that occupies two-thirds of a folio. A Zizyphus jujube with a bit of moss on its trunk. Grapevines so life-like they could be photographs, the tendrils reaching for something to attach themselves to. The unknown artist of the Carrara Herbal observed plants in their natural setting and allowed them equal ease on the page. There is such joy in his renderings, exuberance in his line and detail. And yet he never finished the work. Space was left for many more than the fifty-six portraits that exist. It seems that the fate of the patron Francesco Carrara — deposed in 1403 and strangled in prison three years later — was also the fate of this Herbal with its flowers and vines, its lively trees, its beguiling barley and asparagus: vitality cut short, as a root might be severed from a stalk or a seed head pinched off too early.

  Furthermore, the rings in the branches that have been cut off show the number of its years, and which were damper or drier according to the greater or lesser thickness of these rings. The rings also reveal the side of the world to which they are turned . . .

  — Leonardo Da Vinci, Leonardo on Painting

  How in age a tree remembers, how the feet of tiny birds felt on the bark; how on a summer day, drowsing in sunlight, a tree might have been startled awake by a bear climbing to its first strong branch; how an osprey might have settled on the broken crown to survey the lake, the glittering run of river. How the pines stand in their wild observatories, anchored in rock, looking to the heavens, drinking deeply from the aquifer. They have seen meteorites fall, leaned into wind with sockeye migrating below them; given a small shake as ash from burning forests settled on their boughs.

  How in age our own bodies remember their youth, how it felt to make love on bare ground (pollen drifting from one cone to another), to rise and walk among trees, light shimmering through their leaves. Listen! A nuthatch, a grey jay, a woodpecker, feasting on insects. How time compresses, so that all summers arrange themselves in a codex of dry skin, tart berries on the tongue, the surprise of cold water as we entered rivers. How later, organizing the photo-graphic archive, we try to imagine ourselves back into that tent on Nicola Lake, our children racing down from the volcano, the pines filtering early morning sun so beautifully that later we say, “It was paradise.”

  Trace the long history of weather in their wood, the variability of rainfall, drought, solar storms. This is one way to read their rings:

  5

  The ring width is x, t is the year number of the ring, and n is the number of rings in the sequence. Another way: take a cross-section from that felled tree at the lookout over Kamloops Lake and run your thumb over the wood. Read invasions in the tunnels, read fungus in the blue layer, read a hundred years of trains on the opposite side of the lake, read drought in the fact of its death.

  Nearby, the early texts of trees haunt the strata of the Tranquille Shale, sediments of a shallow lake from the Eocene epoch. Dawn redwoods, ginkgos, white cedars,
pines, elms, alders, beeches, and others yet to be identified (no obvious modern descendant) have left their traces in the sedimentary layers. Where they grew, flowered, and died, mosquitoes hummed, something with feathers hovered, the small Eosalmo driftwoodensis darted in the water.

  When we stopped at the fossil field this past September, thinking to join a dig, it was hot, no one was around, but then a voice called down from the cliffs, echoing in that still air like gunshot. For a moment, it was like being in another story, one set in Navajo country, red rocks glazed with heat. The trail up was very steep, and a hawk drifted. Grasshoppers clicked in the dry grass. The thought of prying fronds of extinct cedars or a tiny winged maple seed from their long sleep in shale was suddenly unthinkable . . . so we turned around on the shelf of rock above the highway and drove away.

  Change Partners (or, The Last Waltz)

  Again and again I begin a basket. The needles are brittle, even after their soaking in warm water. I make a clumsy loop, then throw it in the fire. I found the raffia too awkward to work with the first time, the way it unravelled and split, broke at critical moments. After talking to the woman who made the basket I bought my husband for Christmas two years ago, I decide to try using waxed linen thread instead. (Her basket has that delicate stitching — the tracks of tiny birds across the smooth woven surface. And I’m not sure why it took me so long to think of contacting her for advice; when I bought the basket, she tucked a business card into it with her phone number.)

  I can’t find the thread anywhere on the Coast. One person recommends the Internet. A friend offers to look in Vancouver; she comes back with a bag containing eight small skeins of six-ply linen, like embroidery floss. I asked for unbleached linen and she’s brought some of that, as well as a pale brown, a russet, a green almost exactly the colour of sage. And it’s expensive! My bags of raffia cost a dollar for each two-ounce bag. (Two ounces of raffia is a lot!) Eight skeins of six-ply linen cost slightly more than twenty dollars and even separating the lengths into three-ply strands (which is what the woman advised me to do), I can see that it won’t be a case of a little going a long way. I’ll have to be careful.

  I melt a sheet of pure beeswax and pour it into a little tart tin. When it hardens, I have a block to run my thread through, to strengthen it. The smell is lovely. I’m taken back to the Nicola Valley apiary on the Coldwater Road where we went once to buy honey on a fall day. Walking around to the shed where the processing went on, we passed a whole lot of wooden hives at one end of a loading area (we recognized them from the road into Monck Park where hives are delivered in spring for alfalfa pollination), drowsy bees hovering, and the scent of honey so strong in the air that I stopped and closed my eyes for the sweetness.

  I begin, and begin again. Once, twice, three times. Fourth time lucky. I like the way the linen thread slides smoothly through the coiled pine needles. Around and around I wind and stitch, a slow and serious waltz of materials, turning and backstitching to anchor a tail of thread; weaving in the new trio, my wide-eyed tapestry needle straight-backed and poised.

  Anticipate the second beat. Hesitate a moment. Then select, and soak, needles from Heffley Creek. Introduce them into the circle. They’re brittle and stiff as I coil them and wrap them, not easily coaxed into pliancy. Wrap them with Nicola Lake needles again, supple and long. The stitches are longer and smoother than they were using raffia. And the base is growing, widening, a little dance floor of sweet-scented pine and waxed fine linen.

  Change partners! Introduce needles from the lookout over Kamloops Lake where a nuthatch danced along the length of fallen pine. They settle into the small space, the embrace of the Heffley Creek clusters, and I ease thread over and through to three-quarter time.

  The basket grows, perhaps eight centimetres wide at its base; I’ve begun to build up the sides, turning and wrapping. My hands smell of resin, the drops of sap that linger on some of the clusters of pine needles, and my thumbs are rough with smoothing the coils beneath the threads. I think of waltz tunes — the strong beat followed by two lighter ones, the second one pushing into the third, the hand at the small of the back. I think of “Swan Lake” and “Moon River,” “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” (“You’re literally waltzing on air”), and I hum as I stitch, hum and sway a little as I remember the trees in wind, rapturous and free, now tunnelled with beetles and fallen.

  Because most of the needles I’m using are from dead trees, I look at my bundles, all cleaned and tied with string in their cardboard box, and realize that the geography of them, the narrative of their collection, represents a dying landscape, bracketed by living trees — Nicola Lake and Skihist.

  The next partner in this leafy waltz is from Red Hill, a rest area south of Ashcroft on Highway 1. It’s on the east side of the highway, just a few kilometres south of where the Hat Creek Road meets the highway. (That is one of the prettiest roads on earth, following Oregon Jack Creek up into the upper Hat Creek Valley where ranches are spread out on the top of the world. You can follow the Hat Creek Road up and over to Highway 99, the peaceful road to Pavilion and Lillooet. When I went into the upper Hat Creek Valley in 2003, I don’t remember dying pines. But in the fall of 2006, we were shocked to see the red expanse of them as we drove out Highway 99 to meet 97 at the Hat Creek Ranch, a sight sobering enough for us to each have an extra glass of wine when we stopped for lunch that day at the Bonaparte Bench winery.)

  In the past, we’d always paused at Red Hill to give our dog a chance to stretch her legs when driving north or south on Highway 1. The needles from these dead trees are the shortest of my collection; the longest bunches in this group are only fifteen to sixteen and a half centimetres. Given that the range for ponderosa needles is eighteen to twenty-three centimetres, these are clearly the runts of the litter. It’s hard to imagine a drier location for pine trees than the parched benches from Cache Creek south to Spences Bridge. Arid hills, flinty rock, everything grey and pale green and tawny, an ancient wooden church at the foot of a talus. Yet the soil is obviously rich enough to support pines; and the productive orchards and gardens down towards Spences Bridge have responded eagerly to irrigation. Given water, who knows how voluptuous these lean ponderosas might have become? My fingers are now accustomed to this work, and I’m certain that the Red Hill needles are thinner than the others. But, oh, they smell sweet! It’s as though they’ve concentrated the qualities that make them pine — intensity of scent, of slender brown leaf, of tiny beads of resin along the sheath.

  The Red Hill needles are easy to place. They settle into the embrace of the Kamloops Lake trios, smooth as they circle and rise to the moment when the next bunch is introduced. A hesitation here, then here, as a needle snaps, as I run out of thread, as the short length demands that I stop and choose another trio. Pause, and step, and move with the weaving. A basket of dry leaves grows as I work.

  For this is the truly amazing thing: that clusters of dry pine needles and some lengths of linen or raffia twine can grow into a basket. Who discovered this? Who sat with a pile of needles and some cordage of stripped nettle fibre or root and figured out how to bind them together in this way that is simple yet extraordinary? Who lifted her fingers to her face and breathed in the heady smell of summer, of heat and resin? Who imagined a gathering of spring beauties and Saskatoon berries inside it, waiting to be mashed into cakes?

  There are baskets dating back to 4000 BC, associated with the Egyptians and burial; they contained food for those who accompanied the royal dead to the afterlife. And baskets were used to form pottery before the invention of the potter’s wheel. (Stone Age pots often have the pattern of their wicker moulds on their surfaces, although of course the baskets themselves were more perishable. The pots survived with the shadow of their forms on their ancient sides.)

  By 1569, there was even a Worshipful Company of Basketmakers6 in England, part of the livery or guild tradition in the City of London. They were suppliers to butchers, among others, who would have valued the practicali
ty of baskets for holding and draining meat and viscera, perhaps into a waiting basin so the blood could be kept for pudding; the baskets could be easily rinsed and dried afterwards. (I think of the beautiful open-work baskets made of cedar withes by the Northwest Coast peoples to drain clams and other shellfish, and how the berry baskets in museum collections almost always retain a slight stain from the juices gathered so long ago.)

  The final partner on the dance card: the long needles from the Skihist picnic site, high above the Thompson River as it races to its meeting with the Fraser, entering the waltz. These are a pleasure to work with, so supple and pliant, easily circling the rising rim of the basket. My hands have taken to this in a way my body never took to dancing. As I work, I think of how a basket is more than a sum of its parts, as anything marvellous is. Some dry pine needles collected under trees, raffia, and linen thread pushed through the eye of a tapestry needle. A lump of wax in a foil tart tin. A book for instructions. A bowl to soak and rehydrate bunches from Monck Park, Heffley Creek, Kamloops Lake, Red Hill near Ashcroft, the high bench of Skihist.

  When I finish the basket, I hold it in my hands with the kind of tentative wonder one holds a small bird dazed from a collision with a window. It almost breathes, this basket. What will it hold? Loose change, a necklace, a few nuts in their shells at Christmas? Already it contains a story, though the narrative is perhaps a little quiet for these troubled times. A road trip taken in the early fall, just as the aspens were turning in the Nicola Valley, with stops at Brookmere, Quilchena, the Lundbom Forestry campsite where we ate a meal with friends encountered unexpectedly as they drove in to camp and we were leaving after a walk around the quiet lake (“Why is that motorhome honking?” “I don’t know. A mechanical problem, maybe? We’d better stop.” “It’s Solveigh and Joe!” “No!” “Yes, it is!”).