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“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)