One of the struggles to bringing botany into a scientific framework was that, up until Dürer's time, writers on the natural history of plants deferred to the Classics - Aristotle, Pliny the Elder, Dioscorides - even to denying the evidence of their own eyes. My old biology teacher told us that the common bluebell was named Scylla non-scripta because medieval and early-modern plantsmen were shoe-horning the plant into an ancient description of a plant Scylla which had a mark on the petals. Bluebells have no such mark, hence non-scripta. It is now known as Hyacinthoides non-scripta.
We were tidying up the bookshelves and The Beloved turned up The Naming of Names The Search for Order in the World of Plants (2005) by Anna Pavord and asked if we cd/shd send it out to a new home. "Whoa, not until I've read it", I replied. I've been happily and didactically motoring through it since. It's 400 pages of text n pictures + 70 pages of timeline, notes, references and index AND library books take precedence AND wood needs to be chopped; SO I wasn't done in a week, nor yet in a month. But it is def'ny my jam.
Pavord's thesis is that Θεόφραστος Theophrastus of Lesbos (~371 – ~287 BCE), polymath and successor to Aristotle (384–322 BCE) was the greatest and best of botanists from the classical times but all his original works slipped between the cracks of Dark Age sack and pillage. Chunks of his Περὶ φυτῶν ἱστορία Enquiry into Plants [companion to Aristotle's much better known Τῶν περὶ τὰ ζῷα ἱστοριῶν Enquiry into Animals] were dug up in the Vatican archives and both were translated into Latin by Theodoro of Gaza between 1450 and 1480. Going back to The Source, showed what sorry show of mindless, error-frittered, copying had been carried out by Pliny and Dioscorides. These later chaps were typical of their times when all the smart people were dedicated followers of Plato and his obsession with the Ideal and how our own beautiful, beguiling, pretty world were but a poor shadowy simulacrum of ?heaven? Well be damned to that! What we have is what we get to work with . . . unless we're Iain M. Banks or C.S. "Narnia" Lewis making stuff up. We might as well enjoy, respect and study the plants we see - especially those that are not useful to medicine or agriculture.
Pavord's book documents the transition of botanizing from poring over gospels of ancient wisdom to crawling about in meadows actually looking at reality . . . and looting pretty examples for gardens or 'herbals' of squashed dried specimens to later reference. Part of this was recording the provenance of the plants collected, described or drawn. Paul Green has it easy with GPS on his phone, or an OS 1:50,000 map to report that Epilobium roseum is abundant at S799272 [that's Old Ross] in Co Wexford. In 1632 Leonard Buckner couldn't be as succinct: marestail Equisetum arvense being found ". . . three miles beyond Oxford, a little to the side of Euensham ferry, a bog upon a common by the Beacon hill neare Cumner wood". Location location is essential for the replication / verification of any findings.
There also developed an appreciation, copper-fastened by Linnaeus in the 1700s, that botanical names could / should be labels not descriptors: Plantago foliis ovato-lanceolatis pubescentibus, spica cylindrica, scapo tereti doesn't trip off the tongue. But calling the same plant Plantago media allows my Austrian and Peruvian collaborators to know precisely what we're all talking about. The Genus species convention also formalised the lowest level grouping of similar plants . . . while also down-grading mere varieties within a species. There are 10x more varieties [30,000] of rose than species in the genus Astragulus [3,000] but the former are considered accidentia, the latter substantia. The former include changes in form induced by the environment (or indeed the horticulturalist), the latter the fundamental nature of each plant - although John Ray (1627-1705) and Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603) were developing this concept 300 & 400 years before DNA came on the scene.
On the same page as that ramble near Oxenford, here's a great bit of Brexit exceptionalism by Thomas Johnson (1600-1644) justifying his attention to back-yard plants ". . . I verily believe that the Divine Providence had a care in bestowing plants in each part of the earth fitting and convenient to the foreknowne necessities of the future inhabitants; and if we thoroughly knew the vertues of these, we needed no Indian nor American drugges". Nigel Farage, please copy?
As you may tell from the above, I obtained a good deal of informative edutainment from reading this chunky, profusely illustrated book. Recommended to obsessives. It's widely available in the Irish Library System. Cannot handle the book? Pavord writes on the regular for Country Life and other media.
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