(07-05-2017, 02:19 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hello Rene, you are certainly right about the identity of Gelosia / Gelloxia and Gelesia.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a 1887 book about a manuscript in the Estense library. It says that Gelesia is You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
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I know that this plant drawing is widely identified as Amaranthus tricolor.
The only problem is that A. tricolor was not widely known in Europe, the Meditteranean or even northern Africa in the middle ages, as far as I've been able to determine. It is a Far East, New World, and tropical African plant—indigenous to hot climates.
I've been trying to sort this out for a while and I suspect that some of the drawings are Solenostemon (Coleus) which has many species similar to Amaranthus tricolor.
Have you noticed that these drawings of "A. tricolor" almost never show the distinctive Amaranthus plumes and that many of the drawings do not match each other in terms of the color pattern? When they do, the plant is usually not as colorful and is probably a different species of Amaranth more adapted to temperate climates.
Coleus not only has similarly shaped leaves, but it has a wider range of colors, including green, red, yellow, deep violet and violet-blue. The blues are not typically found in Amaranthus. They are mostly green with some red, most are not as colorful as A. tricolor which also has yellow. In contrast, there are many Coleus species that have a variety of colors.
If you look at the Trinity plant, the flower stalks are more similar to Coleus spikes than to Amaranthus plumes.
Now, there's a wrinkle in the Coleus idea also. I'm not 100% sure, only about 85% sure... It is native to the same region as
Amaranthus tricolor, which means it may not have been known in medieval Europe but... it is in the mint family and more cold-tolerant than Amaranthus tricolor, and thus did have a broader distribution in the 15th century, including Sri Lanka and Tibet and possibly also Pakistan. A number of the flora of Pakistan came into Europe during the Roman occupation and began to be cultivated in the west around the 3rd century or so, so it is possible that Coleus had been brought west by the 1200s.
So, due to the color descriptions, the shape, the distribution at the time of the middle ages, the lack of plumes, the plant that is drawn this way in the older herbals is more likely to be Coleus than Amaranth. The plants are similar enough that many people confuse them. Both Amaranthus tricolor and several species of Solenstemon are known as "Joseph's coat" and both are edible species, so it's possible that both are called by Galesia/Gelesia/etc.
I haven't figured out exactly when A. tricolor was introduced to Europe and began to be more widely known (possibly around the 14th century?), but some of the later herbals do refer to it. The earlier ones, however, especially those that have drawn the plant with violet or blue and with flower spikes instead of plumes (like the Trinity plant), are more likely to be You are not allowed to view links.
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