Is it worthwhile actually trying to identify the plants in the VM?

[-JKP-]

I have written a rather long post about whether or not it is worthwhile trying to work out the plants in the Voynich.

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I would be interested in what people think. Obviously some people (such as Steve D on the Voynich mailing list) spend a lot of time and effort trying to identify the plants, but we never seem to get anywhere. Is it actually possible to label these plants? I would argue that it isn't.

I think it's a mistake to believe that drawings of only moderate quality, with no textual information to help, can be narrowed down to one specific plant.




Take the example of Elizabeth Blackwell's high quality drawings from a couple of centuries ago. Even a few of her drawings haven't been pinpointed by botanists as a specific species.

Many of the old herbal documents were never completed. The plants were drawn but not labeled. All the labels are in other hands and some are clearly wrong. There's a site that lists the Juliana Anicia plants and I don't know who did the identifications (perhaps students?) but many are clearly wrong even when there is information on the Internet leading to more accurate identifications, so those going back to other herbals to help them ID the VMS plants need to first check the accuracy of the original ID.

There are also cases where the illustrators themselves, ones who labeled their own plants, confused one plant with another and many cases where modern interpretations of old names is incorrect. For example, many plants in old herbals are labeled dittany (in various languages), but they didn't mean the plant we now call dittany. Several of the names applied to plants around the 9th and 10th centuries now refer to other plants. You have to understand the plant itself to match them up correctly.



The Plant List (an excellent resource that lists the taxonomically correct names of plants and their synonyms) includes many plants with "unresolved names". Some of the plants with unresolved names are represented by high quality drawings of the plant from old herbals and yet botanists cannot find a plant in nature that exactly matches. One possible reason for that is...

that some of the plants may be extinct, just as Sylphium (prized for its contraceptive properties in Roman times) became extinct due to overharvesting. Even if the plant exists, the specific species in the illustration may be gone and may never have been officially recorded by botanists before it died out.


I think it is worthwhile to try to "decipher" the plants in terms of understanding the drawings and trying to ID them, but those who are coming up with one ID for a plant are perhaps being optimistic—iit may be possible to narrow it down to between 2 or 5 plants in many instances, but rarely one. They do not contain enough detail.