There’s a game show with doors #1, #2, and #3, the contestant’s challenge being to make a prize-winning selection, revealing secrets behind the doors. In a botanical context, we head to Charleston, South Carolina, where you, as the contestant, have three Gardens to consider. At door #1, we encounter Reverend Alexander Garden (1685-1756), a minister …
Author Archives: jamesfolsom
Englished
Imagine rows and rows of bookshelves, tightly arrayed in a layered cube, all made of steel and glass. That’s how I picture The Huntington’s rare book stacks. Dating to 1919, this isn’t a browsing library; it’s more of a safe deposit box. Books are shelved based on number and size, rather than topic. Scattered throughout …
Appendix
Gardeners explore The Herball – or Generall Historie of Plantes Gathered by John Gerard of London – Master of Chirvrgerie (i.e. Surgery) as means to enjoy historically charming aspects of English knowledge and uses of plants in the first half of the 17th Century. Though neither groundbreaking, nor the best example of an academic treatment, …
Infrondarsi*
“All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field” the Old Testament….Isaiah 40:6 Grass and plant metaphors are deeply rooted, playing out in poetry, prose, and arts. No English writer however, more completely delved into the ways of leaves and grass than Walt Whitman, who may have spent …
Inferiority is Complex
Some botanical terms ring of judgment. One example is the pairing of superior and inferior, basically indicating “above” versus “below.” Those words can be heavily loaded in literature and street language, associated with evaluation and assessment. Analyzing Goldsmith (in comparison to Johnson), Isaac D’Isreali concludes: “He might have thought, that with inferior literature he displayed …
Reigning Violets
Violet (as a color) is on the spectrum, which might explain why it is so misunderstood. Isaac Newton, in deciding to designate seven colors to the rainbow, selected violet as his term for a marginally-visible band of light on the far side of blue, a band of color that (like the others) is a continuum …
Goblins
A battle ferments in the Library stacks, as the legacy of John Ruskin combats the power of fruit-foisting goblins imagined by British poet Christina Rossetti and illustrated by her artistic, pre-Raphaelite brother, Dante Gabriel. …Morns that pass by, Fair eves that fly; Come buy, come buy: Our grapes fresh from the vine, Pomegranates full …
Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus’s birthday is 23 May, so each May I think of him and his curious legacy. Revered and derided, contemporary and anachronistic, Linnaeus lived seven decades, and managed to steer the world of botany in irrevocable directions by the time he was 45. Born in 1707 in northern Sweden, he took to plant study …
Reading Plants
With a bit of green literacy, you can read a plant like you read a book. How? – the author wants you to ask. What is the language, and where are the messages? Read further for the answers to those questions. Then, you might also wonder: Why should I read a plant? I script you …
The Third Day
Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. (Genesis 1:9, NIV) In Christian Europe, literal interpretation of the Holy Bible led to basic conclusions that were, in my reading, neither obvious nor …