SPRING BLOG, SORT OF

For many years I have regarded the first day of spring as the one on ...   more »

“FIGS, DATES, LAURELS AND GOD”

 I know that Alistair Campbell, the Blairite spin doctor said “we don’t do God”, but bear with me, presumably you switched to this blog because you have some sort of interest in herbs and you were probably brought up in either a nominally Christian  or Islamic country so it may have some passing relevance to your life

Christmas was very much spent in the company of God, I don’t mean that literally, but Jen had given me Hitchen’s polemic “God is not Great” then various family members did their typical C of E thing, ie, “we’ve been to church, not sure why but it might look good on our score cards when we arrive at the pearly gates”. More particularly Timber Press had  sent me their excellent” Figs, Dates, Laurels and Myrrh”  by Lytton John Musselman to review and the Herb Society allocated me 400 words space in which to do it, effectively reducing two millennia of culture to the status of a Christmas cracker motto. I thought it appropriate therefore to do it a bit more justice here.

Actually herbs and the Bible are an unfortunate combination, the invocation in Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” has resulted in the premature cremation of thousands of our predecessors and that story in  1 Kings 21:2  about Ahab, described by evangelists as “The wickedest man in the Bible” (what no Judas?!) and his wife Jezebel, “The wickedest woman in the Bible” snitching Naboth’s vineyard  to turn it in to a herb garden has shown up herb growers in a bad light at least among the fundamentalists

The problem for Christian creators of biblical gardens is that whilst the Bible is the infallible word of God, God left it to a lot of extremely fallible mortals to interpret his word. This means firstly that many designers have felt free to substitute plants to fit in with environmental constraints, and secondly, modern translators almost invariably evangelists rather than horticulturalists, perpetrate hideous inaccuracies on the grounds of “accessibility” or as we prefer to call it “dumbing down”. Try googling “Bible herbs” to see senseless zealotry made manifest.

It is good therefore that Musselman has come to shed some  light upon this darkness, as he says, he both “loves the Bible” and is a  highly qualified field botanist so although many  of his conclusions accord with Frowde’s  1896 “Helps to the Study of the  Bible”, still in print today, he has the advantages of  using  new and supposedly more accurate  translations than the King James AV, his research is backed by the latest scientific evidence and finally, he not only covers a larger geographical area than his predecessors but embraces the Koran too. Moreover, his work is well presented and beautifully illustrated.

The difficulty of Musselman’s task though is  demonstrated by a photograph of Origanum syriacum  captioned “Hyssop”: This seems wholly justified in that biblical commentators for over a century have recognised that “their” hyssop is more likely to have been an Origanum than  a Hyssopus. He writes that Origanum syriacum is “a plant known in English as Syrian Hyssop”. It isn’t, if only because until very recently Origanum syriacum was almost totally unknown in England, we only started selling it, raised from American seed two years ago. Hyssopus officinalis doesn’t get a mention:  Thus, when he writes, “Hyssop may have been commercially available, perhaps in the same way it is today” he is almost certainly referring to the Origanum. None of this has stopped the web site of one of those loony American herb farms recommending not merely Hyssopus as being suitable for a Bible garden planting, but many other herbs that would have amazed Jesus and his disciples if they had happened upon them in the desert or found them on a local market stall. If we, on either side of the Atlantic can’t agree popular names, we are scarcely likely to agree on the identification of plants from a text written millennia ago in a dead language. Not that this should be seen as a carte blanche to bung in any old weed  on the grounds that a third party can not argue with one’s subjective interpretation of the word of God. This may be an obvious point, which Nigel Hepper made twenty years ago in his   “Planting a Bible Garden”, but it continues all too frequently today.

“Accessibility” and “accuracy” are the words used to justify all these nonsensical infelicities. OK there are plenty of Americans out there too dumb to understand the KJAV (this isn’t to say that young Brits aren’t equally dumb, but nothing would induce them to pick up a bible in the first place, - not even if it came in comic book format with all the warring tribes of Israel armed with Kalashnikovs) but some of us including, one suspects, Christ himself actually enjoy the KJAV. After all, If Jesus had any complaints about the King James Bible, he would surely have zapped the writers and presumably those who promulgated it, as is laid out in Revelation 22: 18 – 19. So why mess with the text? Even Musselman himself balks at substitution of “Tumbleweed” in the NIV for the “wheel” in KJAV, (Ps 83: 13) Admittedly this could be more accurate in that the scribe possibly had Gundelia tournefortii in mind but inevitably it makes one think of the opening of a John Ford movie rather than the ungodly rolling uncontrollably down a slope into the pit of hell. It also brings to mind the polar opposite of the fundamentalist doctrine of “pedantry is all”, the black Madonna on the British Christmas postage stamps a year or two ago. This showed a striking ignorance of the gospel and a patronising tokenism toward blacks, a naive bit of tinkering in the interests of politically correct marketing and no less daft for it. And before some holy roller writes into complain, - yes we all know (well some of us anyway)  about the Black Madonnas  in Loretto, Monserrat, Chartres etc etc, but I still say those on the stamps  represent a cynical marketing ploy rather  than iconographic knowledge on the part of the post office designers.

Fundamentalists cherry-pick the bits they like according to how much money they will bring in, so that they modernise some features and retain the traditional aspects of others. Thus the BVM continues to appear in a million kitschy images in Catholic gift shops dressed like a Fra Angelico/Schongauer/ whatever nun-like figure, as she has done for centuries. That said, one company, one2believe, (really!) has dressed her up in  a tee shirt and jeans  making her barely distinguishable from Barbie herself.  Normally however, this would be regarded as unsustainable in marketing terms so she’s allowed to keep her nice blue robes. Following this through, the Annunciation would take place in a mud brick hovel plonked down in a desert rather than a palace in a splendid garden. Bible garden designers take note! Oh well let’s take it to its logical conclusion and ditch the angel and Mary too since they are “just stories”

The Koranic references give Musselman’s book a unique fascination but the list of plants reflecting the restricted flora to be found in the desert, is necessarily much shorter. Arguably  even more migratory and desert-bound than the Jews, the Arabs had fewer plants to experiment with and less time in which to grow them so even if we were to be given a controlled environment, similar to that proposed for Abu Dhabi,  it would necessarily result in a rather boring garden. Fortunately, an Islamic garden is not necessarily the same as a Koranic garden, so that the magnificence of the Alhambra and the Generalife for instance only came with the combination of settled land tenure and a more clement climate

As far as interpretation goes, the problem is that like almost everybody else,  Musselman uses the Dawood English translation which is extremely hard to navigate, This version follows sura one with sura ninety-nine and finishes with sura  sixty-six so if Musselman had offered us cross references it would have been appreciated. If anything, identities are even harder to discern than those in the Bible, having eventually alighted upon Sura 48:18 for instance, one finds “tree”, but what tree? Certainly not the zukkum tree,  which is found in hell and is arguably the best known tree in the Koran. It has never been identified, not surprisingly since no one has returned to tell us, but Musselman suggests Euphorbia abyssinica.

Musselman’s book is an enjoyable read whilst at the same time it is an invaluable tool for the designers of the ever proliferating Biblical and Koranic gardens. More fun though is its potential for stirring up blood-thirsty controversy amongst those dopey fundamentalists for whom the word of God is not quite enough.

 (Until he was sacked for proclaiming the heretical doctrine that God created all men equal, Anthony Lyman-Dixon was a Baptist lay preacher in Connecticut. He hasn’t “done god” since)

NOVEMBER BLOG

Gosh, is it really all those months since I last posted anything on this blog site? Actually, it’s not that I haven’t actually written anything, the medieval glossary has been expanded to take in Macer’s herbal. It’s a vast amount of work because each of his hundred odd plant names has had to be checked for his sources (usually Pliny or Dioscorides) and his plant identities verified against those of both his contemporaries and modern taxonomy. Anyway, if you want a copy send me an e-mail. And no, don’t bother writing to tell  me that Macer wasn’t Macer, I already know that, thanks

Then there was the report on Sicily for the RHS (referred to in a previous blog). They originally wanted about 3000 words and got 66,000 but then asked for some modern photographs and a commentary. It was time-consuming but a lot of fun to do. I must admit that I enjoy rummaging around in the baggage that gardening and more particularly, herbalism has accreted over the centuries. Showing that the influence of Sicily compared with that of Chrétien de Troyes, on the great medieval garden at Hesdin was minimal, is really going to get up the noses of all the three or four people in the world who give a toss about such things. But once people have got a “popular” bee in their bonnets, no matter how idiotic such as the-Romans-used-lavender-as-a-cosmetic one, there is nothing that is going to change their minds and they will go on writing books and posting things on their web sites regardless of the total absence of evidence to support their dogmatic assertions.

After that, my brain decided that it was becoming a touch fed up and so I wrote a somewhat “noirish” fairy story for the grand children. My daughter had accused me of telling her horror stories when she was little and asked me to do some for her own children. If they ever get past the politically correct susceptibilities of my agent, they will probably enjoy a far greater currency in the outside world than the academic slaughter of a few turgid sacred cows.

Meanwhile in the journal of the Mediterranean Garden Society, Caroline Harbouri asked whether anyone could name any villainous gardeners in fiction. Well, can you? It really is extraordinary difficult. The obvious candidate is Beatrix Potter’s Mr McGregor and I have to confess shame-facedly, that I never thought of him myself.

Has anyone else noticed that seeds are ripening a month later this year because of the foul weather? It’s the sort of thing that the BBC puts on its lunch time news when it can’t think of anything else to say. In fact because the idea of a cold, wet autumn conflicts with its monotonous nanny-state, politically-correct obsession with “global warming”, it probably hasn’t been as tedious about this as it is about most meteorological phenomena. Read into it what you may, we have had pasque flowers blooming in September, cowslips at the end of October and now primroses. I know I am against the BBC, Gordon Brown and the massed ranks of greenies on this, but I don’t blame my dirty old van, the fact that I flew in an aeroplane last April nor that I once forgot to turn off the light in the downstairs loo last month for the fact that my plants don’t know what season it is. We all get confused, moreover whilst I am as aware, if not more aware than a lot of politicians by reason of my job, of climate change, I feel it would be extremely presumptuous of me to blame myself. The way to stop this nonsense at a stroke would be to stop people breeding, but since this would ultimately be prejudicial to all our pensions, no politician and least of all myself, is going to propose it as a solution until it’s too late so we are stuck with a lot of stop-gap tokenism instead of  a proper solution. All of which has diverted me from saying that, yes, seed collecting is still going full swing even as the November frosts chill our bones and whop up the electricity bills. Anyway I was just going out with my bucket to collect the Umbellularia seeds when the phone rang.  So I answered the thing, any possibility of a customer, however fleeting at this time of the year, has to be pounced upon with enthusiasm and avidity. Fat chance. It was some bloke asking if I had fifteen minutes to answer some questions about the service provided by Lloyds Bank. Now I don’t suppose I am the only person on earth who dreads ringing Lloyds Bank more than any other phone call they are compelled to make, except perhaps Norwich Union insurance. We have all gone through a genealogical tree of pressing buttons to be asked by a robot with an incomprehensible ethnic accent to press another number before being cut off just when we imagine the goal to be in sight. So having told him all this, which he gave the impression of having heard a thousand times already that morning, I pointed out how much the bank charges for writing a letter and suggesting that if he wanted 15 minutes of my time, they should pay a compliance fee and stop whingeing about my overdraft. And then I went back to my seed collecting.

The RHS is trying to double its membership and has launched a major initiative to recruit younger gardeners. I know this is civil-service speak, but you will catch my drift. Obviously, it’s A Good Thing. The younger generation, as we’re always being told, are the gardeners (ie our customers) of the future and the only thing that stands between us and the burning out of the planet (or, if you take the view expressed in the penultimate paragraph above, the sole cause of the burning out of the planet). Anyway having sat on one national and one local horticultural education committee, I have to say that I have no problems with children. Certainly, kids get bored out of their minds by adult interests and adult questions but if you can get them on their own, they’re fine. And that’s the first problem, get them on their own individually  and you risk being accused of all manner of horrors, but nevertheless if you grab a bunch, you will find that they are totally ignorant of, but fascinated by all things green especially those that wiggle. Once they can be persuaded to actually put a leaf in their mouths, they sometimes realise they actually enjoy flavours and textures to which they had never previously been exposed. No, the problem is their wretched parents, the yummy mummys who have never learnt to say “NO” to their little darlings, who let their children romp heedlessly around the nursery secure in the knowledge that if anything happens to them, they can sue for massive compensation, backed by the dread department of elf’nsafety. However, even if the parents are happy in their complacency, irresponsibility and stupidity, any insurance claim would certainly result in the nursery losing its public liability  cover and would be closed down on the spot. It follows then that I can not answer parents’ questions whilst simultaneously keeping an eye on their unwittingly suicidal children for them. In spite of a great big notice at the entrance telling parents that because of toxic plants and dangerous machinery, they must keep their children within arms reach at all times, I have had parents exhorting their children to eat unidentified leaves and escaped children rocking 47 kg gas cylinders, which would pancake them if they succeeded in pushing them over. Then we had one mother who so appalled the staff and myself by trying to get her children to sample all the plants on the nursery that we unintentionally convinced her that it was essential to make an advance booking at the local undertakers prior  to approaching anything  with leaves. The girls and I have managed to rear seven kids between us and haven’t lost any yet, but we have begun to wonder at the secret of our success. It seems a bit arrogant to say it’s all down to common sense, but can anyone come up with a better answer? Like I say, one doesn’t have to be a charismatic teacher to get through to kids, but the two essentials are firstly to grab and hold their interest and secondly to set firm guidelines as to what they can and can not do, (they are so surprised by this that they almost invariably comply) the alternative may literally prove fatal.

Summer blog