For ancient Greek and Roman poppies, and opium use, see Homer, The Iliad, trans. E. V. Rieu, updated by Peter Jones with D. C. H. Rieu (London, Penguin, 2003); Homer, The Odyssey, p. 269; John Scarborough, ‘The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine’, in Roy Porter and Mikulás Teich (eds), Drugs and Narcotics in History (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 4; Theophrastus, Enquiry into Plants, vol. 2, pp. 253, 279–81 and 289–91 (from Book 9, Chapters 5, 12, 15); Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, pp. 611–15 and 608–11; Robert T. Gunther (ed.), The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides . . . Englished by John Goodyer (Oxford, 1934), p. 460; The Natural History of Pliny, vol. 4, pp. 196–7 and pp. 275–7 (from Book 19, Chapter 53, and Book 20, Chapter 76); Giulia Caneva and Lorenza Bohuny, ‘Botanic analysis of Livia’s painted flora (Prima Porta, Rome)’, Journal of Cultural Heritage, vol. 4 (2003), pp. 149–55; Wilhelmina Feemster Jashemski, The Gardens of Pompeii, Herculaneum and the Villas Destroyed by Vesuvius, vol. 2, Appendices (New York, Aristide D. Caratzas, 1993), pp. 349–53; Jashemski and Meyer (eds), The Natural History of Pompeii, pp. 139–40; H. Roux and L. Barré, Herculaneum et Pompeii: Receuil Général des Peintures, Bronzes, Mosaiques etc. (8 vols, Paris, Firmin Didot, 1875–7), vol. 1, plate 14; and Ovid, Metamorphoses, p. 267.
For a brief history of Demeter and her daughter Persephone (also known as ‘Kore’, the girl), see Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (eds), The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 447–8. For the poppy in German Romanticism, see Peter Wegmann, Caspar David Friedrich to Ferdinand Hodler: A Romantic Tradition (Frankfurt, Insel, 1993), pp. 72–5; and Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Hymns to the Night, trans. Mabel Cotterell (London, Phoenix Press, 1948), pp. 23–5. Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ was first published anonymously in Punch (8 December 1915), p. 468.
These are my main sources for the poppy in medieval Europe: Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy (London, I. B. Tauris, 2009); Harvey, Mediaeval Gardens, pp. 29–35; John Harvey, ‘Westminster Abbey: the infirmarer’s garden’, Garden History, vol. 20, no. 2 (1992), pp. 97–115; H. R. Loyn and J. Percival, The Reign of Charlemagne: Documents on Carolingian Government and Administration (London, Edward Arnold, 1975), pp. 64–73; Potter, The Rose, pp. 85–7; and Strabo, Hortulus, pp. 48–9.
For Elizabethan and Stuart poppies, see Gerard’s Herball, pp. 295–8 and pp. 368-72 in the revised (1633) edn; Jackson, A Catalogue of Plants; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, taken from Edwin Greenlaw et al. (eds), The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition (11 vols, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–57), vol. 2, pp. 90–91; Parkinson, Paradisi in Sole, pp. 284–7; Aymonin, The Besler Florilegium, p. 404; Crispin de Passe, Hortus Floridus (Utrecht, 1614); Sweert, Florilegium; and Besler, Hortus Eystettensis, Book 2, summer plants of the twelfth order [duodecimus ordo], fols 7–10.
For garden poppies from the eighteenth century onwards, see Miller, The Gardeners Dictionary; Henry Phillips, History of Cultivated Vegetables, second edn (2 vols, London, Henry Colburn, 1822), vol. 2, pp. 57–77; Henry Phillips, Flora Historica: or the Three Seasons of the British Parterre Historic ally and Botanically Treated, second edn revised (2 vols, London, 1829), vol. 2, pp. 188–97; Mrs Loudon, The Ladies’ Flower-Garden of Ornamental Annuals (London, William Smith, 1840), pp. 18–23; Robinson, The English Flower Garden, pp. 206–7; and Nori and Sandra Pope, Colour by Design: Planting the Contemporary Garden (London, Conran Octopus, 1998), pp. 100–103.
The story of the opium poppy’s use in pharmacology draws on many sources, including Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum, pp. 365–9; C. E. Dubler, ‘Afyun’, Encyclopedia of Islam, second edn, ed. P. Bearman et al. (Brill, 2011), Brill Online, British Library, consulted 19 August 2011; John Scarborough, ‘Herbs of the field and herbs of the garden in Byzantine medicinal pharmacy’, in Antony Littlewood et al. (eds), Byzantine Garden Culture (Washington DC, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection, 2002), pp. 182–3; Martin Booth, Opium: A History (New York, St Martin’s Press, 1998), p. 104; Luis Gogliati Arano, The Medieval Health Handbook (London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1976); Gilbert Watson, Theriac and Mithridatium: A Study in Therapeutics (London, The Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1966); Flückiger and Hanbury, Pharmacographia, pp. 40–42; ‘Paracelsus’, Encyclopaedia Britannica Online Academic Edition, 2011, consulted 19 August 2011; Henry E. Sigerist (ed.), Paracelsus: Four Treatises, trans. C. L. Temkin et al. (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1941); William Langham, The Garden of Health (London, 1597), pp. 506–9; William Turner, A New Herball Parts II and III, ed. George T. L. Chapman, Frank McCombie, Anne Wesencraft (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 486–9; Gervase Markham, The English House-wife (London, 1637), pp. 6–12; David E. Allen and Gabrielle Hatfield, Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition: An Ethnobotany of Britain and Ireland (Portland, Timber Press, 2004), pp. 77–8; Donald Watts, Dictionary of Plant Lore (Oxford, Academic Press, 2007), p. 278; Roy Vickery, A Dictionary of Plant-Lore (Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 268; and Pharmacopoeia Londinensis (London, 1618), p. 112. For Thomas Sydenham, see C. G. Meynell, Thomas Sydenham’s Observationes Medicae and Medical Observations (Folkestone, Winterdown Books, 1991), p. 172; and John D. Comrie, Selected Works of Thomas Sydenham, M. D., with a short biography and explanatory notes (London, John Bale, 1922), p. 1. Dr John Jones lists his recommended opiates in The Mysteries of Opium Reveal’d (London, 1700), pp. 294 and 295; and see Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (London, Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 31.
Travellers’ tales about opium habits are taken from Jean Chardin, Voyages du Chevalier Chardin en Perse, et Autres Lieux de l’Orient (4 vols, Amsterdam, 1735), vol. 3, pp. 14–15; Baron François de Tott, Memoirs of Baron de Tott, trans. from the French (2 vols, London, 1785), vol. 1, pp. 141–3; Edward G. Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians (London, Adam and Charles Black, 1893); and Memoirs of ****. Commonly known by the Name of George Psalmanazar; A Reputed Native of Formosa (London, 1764), pp. 56–63.
My quotations from Thomas de Quincey come from the second edition of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (London, Taylor and Hessey, 1823); and for Mike Jay’s perceptive essay on Berlioz, first broadcast on BBC Radio 3 in 2002, see http://mikejay.net/articles/opium-and-the-symphonie-fantastique/. See also Ernest Hartley Coleridge (ed.), Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2 vols, William Heinemann, 1895), vol. 1, pp. 229 and 240; M. H. Abrams, The Milk of Paradise: The Effect of Opium Visions on the Work of de Quincey, Crabbe, Francis Thompson and Coleridge (New York, Harper & Row, 1970); and Robert F. Fleissner, Sources, Meaning, and Influences of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (Lewiston, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). The two French translations of de Quincey’s Confessions are: Thomas de Quincey, L’Anglais Mangeur d’Opium, trans. Alfred de Musset (Paris, 1828); and Charles Baudelaire, Les Paradis Artificiels: Opium et Haschisch (Paris, 1860). See also ‘Le Poison’, in Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, p. 73. For individuals known to have taken opium or laudanum, see Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination, and Barbara Hodgson, In the Arms of Morpheus: The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine and Patent Medicines (Vancouver, Greystone Books, 2001). Cocteau’s comment appears in Jean Cocteau, Opium: The Diary of an Addict, trans. Ernest Boyd (London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1932), p. 16; and Dorothy Wordsworth’s in The Grasmere Journal, revised by Jonathan Wordsworth (New York, Henry Holt and Company, 1987), p. 64. For opium production in Britain, see Loudon, The Ladies’ Flower-Garden, pp. 18–23; and for Fenland poppies, Allen and Hatfield, Medicinal Plants in Folk Tradition, pp. 77–8.
These works were helpful on the poppy in western art: Celia Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance (London, Frances Lincoln, 2011); Roberts (ed.), Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography; and Mancoff, Flora Symbolica. For the ‘language of flowers’ see Potter, The Rose; Le Langage des fleurs, ou les Selams de l’Orient (Paris, 1819); de Latour, Le Langage des Fleurs, pp. 275 and 225; John Ingram, Flora Symbolica; Or, the Language and Sentiment of Flowe
rs (London, Frederick Warne & Co., 1870), pp. 140–1; Mrs E. W. Wirt of Virginia, Flora’s Dictionary (Baltimore, Lucas Brothers, 1855), p. 102; and Delord, Les Fleurs Animées, pp. 242–4 (author’s translation).
My main background sources to the Opium Wars were Peter Ward Fay, The Opium War, 1840–1842 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1975), and Hsin-pao Chang, Commissioner Lin and the Opium War (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1964), supplemented by Toby and Will Musgrave, An Empire of Plants: People and Plants that Changed the World (London, Cassell, 2000). For points of detail, I have also drawn on J. F. B. Tinling, The Poppy-Plague and England’s Crime (London, Elliot Stock, 1876); Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, trans. Hon. Henry E. J. Stanley (London, Hakluyt Society, 1866), pp. 221–3; Flückiger and Hanbury, Pharmacographia, p. 41; Booth, Opium; and Nathan Allen, An Essay on the Opium Trade (Boston, 1850). For American involvement, see Diana L. Ahmad, The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws (Reno and Las Vegas, University of Nevada Press, 2007), especially pp. 20–21; and for drug trafficking today, see Tom Kramer et al., With drawal Symptoms in the Golden Triangle: A Drug Market in Disarray (Amsterdam, Transnational Institute, 2009). Mark Twain’s opium den appears in Roughing It (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972), pp. 353–5; Michael Pollan’s report, ‘Opium, made easy, one gardener’s encounter with the war on drugs’, in Harper’s Magazine, vol. 294, no. 1763 (April 1997), pp. 35–58; and the innocent poppy field in L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz (Chicago, George M. Hill, 1900), Chapter 8. Conan Doyle’s story, The Man with the Twisted Lip, was published by George Newnes.
On the chemistry and pharmacology of opium, see Rudolf Schmitz, ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner and the discovery of morphine’, Pharmacy in History, vol. 27, no. 2 (1985), pp. 61–74; Scarborough, ‘The opium poppy in Hellenistic and Roman medicine’, p. 12; Flückiger and Hanbury, Pharmacographia, pp. 53–4; Hodgson, In the Arms of Morpheus; Ryan J. Huxtable and Stephen K. W. Schwartz, ‘The isolation of morphine – first principles in science and ethics’, Molecular Interventions, vol. 1, no. 4 (October 2001), pp. 189–91; Susanna Fürst and Sándor Hosztafi, ‘Pharmacology of poppy alkaloids’, in Jeno Bernáth (ed.), Poppy: The Genus Papaver (Amsterdam, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998), pp. 291–318; and James A. Duke, ‘Utilization of papaver’, Economic Botany, vol. 27 (October–December 1973), pp. 390–400. For the drugs trade today, see Jeno Bernáth, ‘Overview of world tendencies on cultivation, processing and trade of raw [opium] and opiates’, in Bernáth (ed.), Poppy, pp. 319–35; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2011 (New York, United Nations, 2011), pp. 45–86; and Herbal Pharmacology in the People’s Republic of China. Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies, was published by John Murray (London, 2009), and Camilla Swift’s article ‘The romance of Midland Farm’ appeared in The Garden, vol. 136, no. 6 (June 2011), pp. 384–7.
Rose
Rilke’s poem comes from ‘Les Roses II’ in The Complete French Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. A. Poulin Jr (Saint Paul, Minn., Graywolf, 2002), p. 3. For full sources on the rose, see Jennifer Potter, The Rose: A True History (London, Atlantic Books, 2010). Sir Arthur Evans described his excavations in The Palace of Minos, vol. 2, part 2, pp. 454–9; and see Arthur O. Tucker, ‘Identification of the rose, sage, iris, and lily in the “Blue Bird Fresco” from Knossos, Crete (ca. 1450 B.C.E.)’, Economic Botany, vol. 58, no. 4 (Winter 2004), pp. 733–5. Other sources on the rose’s early history include: Herodotus, The Histories, p. 550; A. S. Hoey, ‘Rosaliae Signorum’, The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 30 (1937), pp. 13–35; and R. D. Fink, A. S. Hoey and W. F Snyder, ‘The Feriale Duranum’, Yale Classical Studies, vol. 7 (1940), pp. 115–20; The Natural History of Pliny, especially vol. 4, pp. 310–14 (from Book 21, Chapter 10); Naphtali Lewis, Life in Egypt under Roman Rule (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1985); Jashemski and Meyer, The Natural History of Pompeii; and Annamaria Ciarallo, Gardens of Pompeii (Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001).
For roses in Charlemagne’s time, see Loyn and Percival (eds), The Reign of Charlemagne, p. 73; and for roses in Byzantium, Costas N. Constantinides, ‘Byzantine gardens and horticulture in the late Byzantine period, 1204–1453: the secular sources’, in Littlewood et al. (eds), Byzantine Garden Culture, pp. 87–103. My sources for roses in Moorish Spain include Le Livre de l’Agri culture d’Ibn-al-Awwam, trans. J.-J. Clément-Mullet (2 vols, Paris, 1864), pp. 281–3; and John Harvey, ‘Gardening books and plant lists of Moorish Spain’, Garden History, vol. 21, no. 1 (1993), pp. 118–20. Jerry Stannard names medieval roses in ‘Identification of the plants described by Albertus Magnus, De Vegetabilibus’, Res Publica Litterarum, Studies in the Classical Tradition, vol. 2 (1979), pp. 281–318. For Martin Schongauer’s The Madonna of The Rose Bower, see Fisher, Flowers of the Renaissance, pp. 20–21 and 94–5.
Charles Joret explored the Persian origins of the rose in La Rose dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age (Paris, 1892). For the Damask rose’s parentage, see Hikaru Iwata et al., ‘Triparental origin of Damask roses’, Gene, vol. 259 (2000), pp. 53–9. These sources were helpful on the rose’s gradual diffusion: Zohary and Hopf, Domestication of Plants, pp. 248–9; and Andrew M. Watson, Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques 700–1100 (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Jekyll’s comments on the Centifolia’s smell come from Gertrude Jekyll and Edward Mawley, Roses for English Gardens (London, Country Life, 1902), p. 12.
Two good sources on Chinese roses are Guoliang Wang, ‘Ancient Chinese roses’, in Andrew V. Roberts (ed.), Encyclopedia of Rose Science (3 vols, Amsterdam, Elsevier Academic Press, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 387–96; and ‘A study on the history of Chinese roses from ancient works and images’, Acta Horticulturae, no. 751 (2007), pp. 347–56. The report on Chinese nursery gardens is taken from Sir George Staunton Bt, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China (2 vols, London, 1797).
For a re-evaluation of the Empress Josephine’s reputation as France’s greatest rose lover, see Potter, The Rose, pp.178–204, and pp. 363–90 for nineteenth-century rose mania. Dean Hole’s comments come from Samuel Reynolds Hole, A Book about Roses (Edinburgh, William Blackwood & Sons, 1869 and many subsequent editions). Among many later sources on rose breeding, I consulted Pat Shanley and Peter Kukielski (eds), The Sustainable Rose Garden: Exploring 21st Century Environmental Rose Gardening (New York, Manhattan Rose Society, 2008), pp. 57–66; and David Austin, The Rose (Woodbridge, Garden Art Press, 2009).
Here are some of my sources for the rose in perfumery: Theo phrastus, ‘Concerning odours’, in his Enquiry into Plants, vol. 2, pp. 323–89; R. J. Forbes, Short History of the Art of Distillation (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1948); J. Ch. Sawer, Rhodologia: A Discourse on Roses and the Odour of Rose (Brighton, W. J. Smith, 1894), see p. 23 for Engelbert Kaempfer’s remarks on Persian roses, and p. 25 for Geronimo Rossi; Wheeler M. Thackston (ed. and trans.), The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999); Eugene Rimmel, The Book of Perfumes (London, Chapman & Hall, 1865); and Georges Vigarello, Concepts of Cleanliness: Changing Attitudes in France since the Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
The literature on the healing rose is extensive: see Potter, The Rose, pp. 293–331 and 492–6. My principal sources include: Dioscorides, De Materia Medica; Turner, A New Herball: Parts II and III, p. 545; Langham, The Garden of Health, pp. 532–40; Herbal Pharmacology in the People’s Republic of China, p. 206; Josselyn, New Englands Rarities Discovered, p. 58; Gerard, The Herball, pp. 1082–4; Nicholas Culpeper, Pharmacopoeia Londinensis: Or the London Dispensatory (London, 1653); Benjamin Woolley, The Herbalist: Nicholas Culpeper and the Fight for Medical Freedom (London, HarperCollins, 2005), especially pp. 174–6; John Evelyn, Fumifugium: Or The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated (London, 1661), pp. 24–5; Ro
bert Boyle, Medicinal Experiments: Or, A Collection of Choice and Safe Remedies (London, 1731); Herbal Drugs and Phytopharmaceuticals on a Scientific Basis, second edn (Stuttgart, Medfarm, 2001), pp. 424–6; and Nursing Practice, 22 September 2008.
My discussion of the rose as the flower of love begins with Paul Jellinek, The Psychological Basis of Perfumery, ed. and trans. J. Stephan Jellinek (London, Blackie Academic & Professional, 1997). Among many other sources, these stand out: Anne Carson, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (London, Virago, 2003); Ovid’s Fasti; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1971); Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler, Poems of Cupid, God of Love (Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1990); Joseph L. Baird and John R. Kane, La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents (Chapel Hill, North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literature, no. 199, 1978); ‘The Parliament of Fowls’, in Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, Mass., Houghton Mifflin, c.1987), p. 389; Jack B. Oruch, ‘St Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February’; in Speculum, vol. 56 no.3 (1981), pp. 534–65; Gordon Williams, A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature (3 vols, London, The Arthouse Press, 1994), see entries for bud, flower, garland, rose, velvet; Eric Partridge, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, second edn (London, George Routledge & Sons, 1938); and Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographica: A Description of the Body of Man (London, 1615). Rilke’s poem, Les Roses IX, appears in Rilke, The Complete French Poems, pp. 6–7; and Jo Shapcott’s ‘Rosa Sancta’ is from Tender Taxes (London, Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 67.
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