According to Joseph Miller (1722), “the Fig-tree seldom grows to be a tree of any bigness in our parts, being clothed with Large leaves bigger than Vine-Leaves, full of high veins, and divided for the most part into five blunt-pointed segments, yielding a thin milky Juice when broken. It beareth no visible flowers, and they …
Author Archives: jamesfolsom
Joyfull Newes?
I’m fond of the title of John Frampton’s promotional book Joyfull Newes out of the New-founde Worlde. Far from original reporting, this was Frampton’s translation of Nicolás Monardes’ Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, a Spanish trilogy (1565-1574) touting plants and other materia medica Monardes held as exciting revelations …
Aloha Prince
Decades ago, I gave a one-day botany class for textile designers, though it might better have been termed a crusade. I had seen too many fabrics and wall coverings in which the plants were artfully but awkwardly interpreted, orchids with stamens like tulips, leaves with veins that made no sense, and attachments that are unnatural. …
Crest Fallen?
Hardly! Succulent plant collectors are jubilant when plants “crest” to form handsome aberrant growth forms. And botanists are amused also, because “monstrous” forms give new clues as to how plants grow and develop. Walking through the Huntington Desert Garden Conservatory, visitors can examine numerous crested growth forms, specimens that are numerous not because they are …
Leafy Longings
When it comes to sex, Botany has its own expectations. Plants normally include male and female parts in the same individual, commonly even in the same flower. In fact, flowers that bear both anthers (male) and ovaries (female) are so standard as to be called “perfect,” while lacking one or the other makes a flower …
Civil Oranges
Shakespeare*…. “Civil, Count. Civil as an orange, and something of that same jealous complexion.” From ancient times, Europeans knew Oranges based on the small, bitter, Mediterranean Seville Orange, Citrus aurantium. That orange, flavorful yet mostly inedible, found utility in England once sugar was plentiful enough to allow creation of orange marmalade, a nearly-crystallized sweet jam …
Carpels vs. Carpals
Some words are unrelated, yet curiously sympathetic – road and rode, wrote and rote, die and dye… Carpel and Carpal fall in that category. They sound the same, and both words have to do with individual parts that may function together. But any relationship has only to do with their etymological roots. Carpel comes to …
Six Books on Plants, People, Poetry, and Politics
The Huntington’s catalog entry is not enticing: Abrahami Couleij Angli, poemata Latina. In quibus continentur, sex libri plantarum, viz. duo herbarum. Florum. Sylvarum. Et unus miscellaneorum. But on the other side of the description is a most remarkable bit of work, a neoclassical homage to plants and politics. Published originally in 1662, the six books …
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Withering Heights
From winter through spring, you’ll find Foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) flowering in The Huntington’s Herb and Shakespeare Gardens. It’s a wonderful biennial we treat as an annual, bolting with a tall raceme (a one-stemmed inflorescence with stalked flowers) that continues to produce flowers at its apex until some point of exhaustion. The tubular flowers are perfect …
Botany’s Poets Laureate
I wager not many botanists have heard of Nahum Tate (Britain’s poet laureate from 1692 into 1715), Abraham Cowley, or Girolamo Fracastoro. Tate (formerly spelled Teate) was inimitably neoclassical and romantically optimistic, part of his notoriety resting on rewrites of King Lear, Othello, and Hamlet so as to have happier endings. But beyond recasting Shakespeare, …