It's my opinion, based on looking at the plant drawings year after year, that the naturalistic ones are pretty accurate. The illustrator even paid careful attention to leaf margins.
I'm not sure why you say the VMS drawing doesn't address the leaf edges. It specifically shows them as being serrated. The leaves of baneberry are serrated (some species of Acatea are more serrated than others, but they are all serrated).
If we go with the logic that the drawings are bad, then we can identify the VMS plants as anything we want and one person's argument won't be much better than another. That won't get us very far.
Some of the drawings are mnemonic or stylized, these are harder to identify, but I don't see why we can't do the best we can with those that are naturalistic.
Basing a plant ID on a hypothesis about its function involves a lot of prior assumptions. You have to demonstrate evidence for those assumptions before the ID becomes valid.
The VMS drawing has very distinctive long, tall tassels of berries that grow upward. Nettle never has this feature. Nettle seeds (of the species you picture) are very small and they hang from the leaf nodes, quite unlike the VMS drawing. There is a species of nettle (Roman nettle) with ball-like seeds, but they do not grow on long upright tassels.
I'm not sure why you say the VMS drawing doesn't address the leaf edges. It specifically shows them as being serrated. The leaves of baneberry are serrated (some species of Acatea are more serrated than others, but they are all serrated).
If we go with the logic that the drawings are bad, then we can identify the VMS plants as anything we want and one person's argument won't be much better than another. That won't get us very far.
Some of the drawings are mnemonic or stylized, these are harder to identify, but I don't see why we can't do the best we can with those that are naturalistic.
Linda wrote:I also hold a hypothesis that the plants drawn in the vms are there as information for the possibility of the food supply being disrupted by flooding or other apocalyptic situations.
Basing a plant ID on a hypothesis about its function involves a lot of prior assumptions. You have to demonstrate evidence for those assumptions before the ID becomes valid.
The VMS drawing has very distinctive long, tall tassels of berries that grow upward. Nettle never has this feature. Nettle seeds (of the species you picture) are very small and they hang from the leaf nodes, quite unlike the VMS drawing. There is a species of nettle (Roman nettle) with ball-like seeds, but they do not grow on long upright tassels.