Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

Morten St George: It’s nice that someone was able to verify that none of the 40,000 plant species found in the Amazon rainforest look like any of the plants depicted in the VMS.

Now you are twisting my words.

But I will stand by my statement that the overall morphology of the VMS plants (taken as a whole) is not consistent with Amazon rainforest plants.

Nor do I think they are extinct plants (except perhaps a small minority).

The form of viola shown in the VMS is not an Amazon rainforest plant. The flower, the layout of the stalks, and the shape of the leaves is characteristic of temperate-zone violas (both New and Old World, but most of those that fit most closely are native to the Old Word).
Ricinus (which is a probable ID) is a eurasian plant.
Cannabis (which is not a definite ID, but it's a likely one) is a eurasian plant.
Tragopogon is a Eurasian plant.
The form of Menyanthes or Vallarsia in the VMS is both New World and Old World, depending on which one it is (they look almost the same, so it's almost impossible to distinguish them from a drawing). In the Old World, they are mostly in SW and W Asia and SE Europe, but in the New World, they're not native to the Amazon rainforest, they are from the Gulf region.
The plants in the VMS that might be related to the Lilium family are more similar to Old World Lilium than those in the Amazon rainforest.


Every ecosystem has plants with a certain look-and-feel because they have adapted to local moisture levels, winds, soil conditions, and altitudes. Even if the same plant can be found in different zones or at different altitudes, there are important differences in how it grows (e.g., alpine plants are rarely tall like those from rainforests or from lower elevations).


The VMS plants aren't even all from the same place (e.g., if the one that looks like Ricinus is Ricinus, it is frost-tender and can't grow in cold climates, but some of the other plants can) but they do, as a group, show more similarity to temperate-zone plants than to subtropical/tropical plants. Every medieval herbal has a few "exotics" (plants or spices that were imported).


In fact, I'll make a prediction here that not only are they NOT all (or mostly) extinct plants, but the majority I believe will be found to be common plants.

I've heard that the Italian protozoa animal on folio 2v is actually an American tropical plant called Nymphoides aquatica. It grows on the surface of swamp water and no doubt this is what gives the green color to the water in the biology section.

There seems to be little doubt that the real nymphs are plants and not Italian nuns: the nymph plant has a stem like the one depicted in the VMS and, above all, it sprouts out a white flower exactly as depicted in the VMS. It's an open and shut case on ID. This plant currently lives on the north side of the Caribbean. Whether or not it also lived on the south side of the Caribbean during medieval times remains to be determined.

The same applies to the alligator gar fish depicted on folio 70r. They currently live only on the north side of the Caribbean but their zone is known to be shrinking. I did a Google image search on "fish in Itlay" and saw nothing like it. This is definitely an American fish and not an Italian fish.

In view of possible pointers to tropical North America as opposed to tropical South America, I am not as strong on Venezuela as I was just one month ago. But note that the naked women are harder to explain for the north as it can get cold there half the year.  In all cases, however, the VMS remains on the American side of the Atlantic rather than on the Italian side.