The VM as Outsider Art

[Bernd]

Rather than being fantastical plants (though fancifully drawn), my theory is all of these plants existed but at least some were (a) experimental and/or (b) became extinct sometime later.

I think both the extinction hypothesis and the grafting hypothesis can be rejected as they are incompatible with both evolutionary biology and plant physiology.

While extinct medicinal plants are known, for example the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. of classic antiquity, it remained identifiable as Apiaceae and most likely was the recently rediscovered You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.. It looks like fennel, nothing unusual. Keep in mind most 'recently' (in historical times) extinct plant species either survived in culture or at least have very close to virtually identical looking living relatives. Many were island varieties. No plant families or even orders became extinct in historical times. Even Cenozoic plant fossils back to 65 Ma are remarkably similar to today's flora and while the species themselves long became extinct, most can easily be classified at least to family level, sometimes even genus. This is not the case for VM plants. They are simply not realistic depictions of plants, neither from a taxonomic nor physiological perspective. And what are the chances of the author exclusively depicting plants which became extinct a few hundred years later without a single even remotely similar relative species surviving? In my opinion zero, even if we were talking about a remote island on which plants underwent some weird adaptive radiation. Even much less in Europe with its generally poor postglacial biodiversitythat has a wide distribution range.

Grafting can also be excluded for the reasons above, even if we divide above- and below-ground parts and include the extremely rare possibility of grafting chimeras, the plants still remain non-realistic, furthermore grafting of herbaceous non-woody plants was not a common procedure until the 20th century and is by no means trivial. It is not possible to graft unrelated species and compatibility is highly limited even with present-day technology. The first known successful interspecific herbaceous grafting was only done in the 1920s in Japan for watermelon shoots with bottle gourd rootstocks. Vegetable grafting combining several bottle gourd rootstocks to a single shoot to produce abnormally large fruit was known in China since the 5th century but remained a curiosity without wide-spread application. I am not aware of any herbaceous grafting experiments in medieval Europe, or in fact before the mid-20th century, see Lee, J.-M., & Oda, M. (2010). Grafting of Herbaceous Vegetable and Ornamental Crops.

So regarding the VM plants, I'm with Koen, similarly fantastic (or simply inaccurate due to lack of fresh reference material) illustrations are not unknown from herbals, plus we simply do not know what the author(s) of the VM drawings we classify as 'herbal' actually meant to depict. But I would rank realistic representations of extinct plants or exotic inter-generic grafts among the lowermost possibilities.