Morten St George Theory

[-JKP-]

The various millets etc in the Tacuina remain the best sunflowerbusters in my opinion. Confronted with these images, so influential and close in time to the VM's creation, I don't see how anyone, botanist or otherwise, could still hold on to New World claims based on the supposed sunflower.

At first glance, the VMS looks like an effort to catalog and describe plants found in the tropics. A closer inspection, however, reveals otherwise. Some of the plants depicted in the VMS are so absurd that they might not even be evolutionary possible, as would be the case, for example, with an ape having three eyes.

They have never looked like tropical plants to me. Even before I started identifying individual plants, that seemed fairly clear.

Plants from certain ecosystems have certain adaptations that are very recognizable. Australian plants, tropical plants, alpine plants, northern plants, Mediterranean plants, aquatic plants, heavy-rain forest plants, all have certain kinds of leaves, stems and flowers to suit their environment. If there are a couple of dozen images, then you can often exclude several regions and sometimes even pinpoint the general ecosystem.

The VMS plants are temperate plants. They are not tropical or Australian and don't appear to be east Asian either. They appear to be warm-temperate rather than alpine. They're the kind of plants that grow in northern Italy and central Europe, maybe some of the cooler coastal pockets in northern Africa, and in North America in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold regions on each coast. I'm not saying that because I think that's where the VMS originates. I'm saying it because the plant-forms in the VMS are those kinds of plants.


I will go so far as to say a number of them are forest-margin plants (not all of them) and semi-wetland plants. I will also go so far as to say quite a few of them are common plants.

I'm pretty confident about them not being tropical plants. The only exceptions might be a small number of spice plants that were easy to dry and import, but in most cases the plant itself was not imported, it was usually the bulbs, seeds, or bark or whichever part of the plant was desirable and easy to transport. Even if there are a few of these, they are definitely the minority. There are hundreds of plants in the VMS and by-and-large, they are temperate plants.