Plant Pictures - Sources and references - query

[-JKP-]

21.000?...then it would be ezy pezy for you to identify most VMS plants, or at least the most common roots.

LOL! They're drawings by a nonexpert artist, not photos, and some of them have mnemonic parts, rather than naturalistic ones, which means the morphological information isn't in the drawing and you have to try to determine the name or use of the plant without having the whole drawing of the plant.

Also, it's possible some of the parts of the plant (ones that are not important to the use of the plant) may have been left out. I think that may explain some of the oddballs. For example, if the roots and leaves are used, the flower may not be shown. Many plants have the same basic roots and leaves which means identifying the plant without the flower (or without an accurate flower) can be difficult.


It's quite a challenge. I can narrow some of them down to three or four species, but the difference in species can make a complete difference in the name of the plant and how it was used. Medieval drawings of primroses and daisies (Bellis) are almost identical, but the plants are not the same. Gramina (e.g., couch grass) was often drawn the same as Acorus (a plant that resembles an iris) even though they have almost nothing in common except for skinny leaves and a lumpy rhizome.

Medieval plant names are just as confusing. Brictannica sometimes meant Britannica, sometimes Betonica, and sometimes Veronica—completely different plants. Palma Christi was sometimes an orchid, sometimes Ricinis. In some regions unrelated plants that are purplish-blue were all called Viola, even though they were several different species.

Plant names were different before the New World was discovered. Erd Apfel used to mean Cyclamen (pigs eat them). After the potato was brought to Europe, the name was used for the new plant, so one has to be careful to check the etymology of the name. And so it goes.


If an expert botanical artist like Elizabeth Blackwell had painted them, we would have identified 99% of them by now, but she didn't. Botanical art didn't really exist yet, except in the borders of a few French or Flemish illustrations. Plant drawings were related to function, tradition (Galen, Pliny, Pseudo-Apuleius, etc.), and visual memory aids. Some of the old herbals appear to have been created by medical students. You learned the use of the plant and then you made a quick sketch of it.

Another difficulty is determining whether a plant was known at the time the manuscript was created. For example, botanists are still not 100% sure people in Europe or the southern Mediterranean were aware of nightshade (it's primarily a New World species). What the ancients called "solanum" does not match descriptions of what we call nightshade and it's not certain whether the Indian and far eastern nightshades had yet reached the west with the possible exception of eggplant.

Sugar cane is another example. There's a definite image of sugar cane (called Canna or Cannamellis) in some of the herbals. It's a far eastern plant but it turns out the Persians (who had contact with the Chinese in the 6th century), brought it west earlier than other plants that were not known until the 16th century.


The real change in botanical imagery came in the mid- to late-1400s, when people started studying the plants rather than just copying old drawings, and collecting herbarium specimens. Even then, it took another century before the visual accuracy of the drawings became more important than textual descriptions by Galen and Pliny (and visual mnemonic devices). The invention of the printing press may have been an important factor in the improvement of the drawings. If you were going to print 500 copies of a book and make some money selling them, you could afford to hire a decent artist to create better drawings.