Cover Story: Back to Their Roots ; For Her New Book, Anna Pavord Travelled to the Ends of the Earth to Investigate the Origins of Plant Names. In This Exclusive Preview, We Join Her As She Retraces the Steps of the Adventurers and Artists Whose Work Defin
By Anna Pavord
IAM RIDING with Kazakh horsemen through the Tien Shan mountains of Central Asia. It is late April and a storm has passed briefly through the snowy peaks. Now the sun is shining again and a rainbow hangs out over the great flat plain below us. The plain, littered with failed enterprises of the Soviet era ” broken irrigation channels, ruined factories ” stretches from the foothills of the Tien Shan northwards to the beginnings of the next great range of mountains, the Karatau, which we can see spiky and stark against banks of white cloud. Steam is rising from the narrow grey- spotted flanks of Alexander’s horse and from the rough canvas saddle bags slung over its rump. My saddle is a bright velvet cushion, packed on top of a boat-shaped metal frame, the rein a plaited braid. The going is steep and rough, not a path that I can see, so I concentrate on the way Alexander’s horse is moving, weaving in and out of low mounds of evergreen juniper, skirting vast boulders, slithering down muddy banks to cross streams swollen by rain. Occasionally the horses put up red-legged chukar partridges; like mechanical, wind-up tin toys, they whir up over the junipers on fast, noisy wings.
Rounding a bluff, we emerge on a plateau where, crammed over the ground, more tightly than the stitches of a Kazakh carpet, are mahogany-coloured fritillaries, blue irises, crocuses the blue- white of icebergs, yellow junos, sheets of tulips with snakeskin mottled leaves, low bushes of pink- flowering cherry, alliums, patches of violet, spears of eremurus emerging like red-hot pokers from elegant sheaves of leaf, brilliant explosions of giant fennel spun from thread as fine as green silk, purplish-magenta vetches, corydalis, arching plumes of Solomon’s seal, arrow-shaped arums. I know all these and can give them names because there is scarcely a plant lover in the Western world who has not tried to grow them, to persuade them that a bed of damp clay and a summer of cloud and drizzle is a fair exchange for life out here on the shale-strewn slopes of the great Tien Shan, where summers are hot enough to burst a thermometer.
These plants are flamboyant, irresistible superstars of the plant world, destined since man first set eyes on them for a stage far wider than the corner of Central Asia that Nature intended for them. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, when European embassies were established in the capital of the new Ottoman empire, the way was clear for these Eastern plants to be introduced into Europe. And they were, in increasingly large numbers. In the hundred years between the mid-15th and mid-16th centuries, 20 times as many plants entered Europe from the East as had arrived in the previous 2,000 years. Moving along the long-established Silk Route, lilies, fritillaries, hyacinths, anemones, turban ranunculus, crocuses, irises and tulips from these same mountains travelled with bales of silk through Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara and Turkmenistan, then on to Baku and Jerevan before arriving at Constantinople, the springboard for entry into the countries of Western Europe.
While my horse grazes with finicky care between the gageas and the wild roses, I’m thinking of those baggage trains, the saddlebags, the hand-made harness, the yurts put up and dismantled, the fires built against bears and wolves and the practicalities of carrying plants, in tact, so far from their natural habitats. They survived, of course, because the best of the plants, the most desirable and dazzling flowers, were bulbs. Once they had flowered, they rapidly gathered their resources back into themselves and rested underground for the summer, protected from the heat by the stony soil lying over them. During these months of dormancy, bulbs could be carried long distances without any harm, perfectly packaged, growth suspended. Like the silk that gave its name to this great trade route, they were high-value, low-volume goods, worth a merchant’s trouble.
My horse is moving to join Alexander’s through a big patch of yellow Juno irises, squashing them under its unshod hooves. ‘Sorry,’ I say to the flowers, as they lie crushed in their sheaves of wide, white-rimmed leaves, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I’ve seen this iris only once before, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a single bloom held reverently in front of me in a clay long-tom pot, cultivated by the one man in England who has the skill to persuade it to flower. ‘Iris,’ I say to Alexander, who speaks Kazakh with a bit of Russian on the side. ‘Ukrop,’ he replies. ‘Ukrop.’ It’s the flower’s local name. ‘Iris orchioides,’ I say, more to myself than him, for that is its botanical name and surname, its passport out of Kazakhstan. With this tag round its neck, assigned by the French taxonomist Ebie- Abel Carriere in 1880 (he’d seen it growing in a nurseryman’s collection and published the first description of it in the Revue Horticole) it can pass through the hands of Spaniards, Belgians, Americans, Australians, Brazilians and Japanese who will all recognise it as one particular species, with special characteristics that separate it from all other Central Asian irises.
Since medieval times, in Western Europe, Latin had been the language of the written word, understood equally well in France, Italy, England or the Netherlands. The Latin names applied to plants in the first written herbals were gradually honed over the next 300 years into a special botanical language, a kind of Latin Esperanto, understood by anyone, anywhere in the world who is interested in plants. The tag, of course, is meaningless to the plant itself, which, as for millions of years past, responds only to external stimuli: light, darkness, warmth, cold, moisture, heat, horses’ hooves. It’s not of much interest to Alexander either; he’s spent his whole life so far in Dzhabagly, the village on the plain below, and is likely to spend the rest of it in the same place. The common names, by which he knows at least 80 per cent of the plants in the mountains, are the most useful in this community. My pear is their grusha. My nettle is their krapiva. My tulip is their kyskaldak. The mushrooms he has been collecting are sinenozhka and that local name is all he needs to signify that these fungi are not poisonous and that, being delicacies in the area, he will be able to sell them for a good price to his neighbours.
But what was the process by which all these fabulous plants found new, universally understood names after they had arrived in foreign lands, far from home? That is the story I’m telling in my new book, The Naming of Names. Passed from hand to hand, from merchants to ship’s captains, from travellers to nurserymen, from diplomats to noblemen, from missionaries to monks, moving from Central Asia to Pisa, Padua, Provence, Paris, Leyden, London, plants lost their common names, their local identities. And yet they must have names, if only for practical reasons. As the pioneering Italian plantsman, Antonio Brasavola pointed out in the 16th century, ‘If it were possible to understand and comprehend matters without employing words, then there would be no need for names: but neither arts nor sciences can be understood or learned without using names.’
Many plants were brought in to Europe for medicine, to increase the range of the druggist’s pharmacopoeia. Most medicines came from herbs (‘simples’ they were called) and new ingredients gave hope of new cures, provided the ingredients were true to name. A plant’s pharmaceutical value depended on the plant-hunter’s ability to distinguish one species from another; its economic value would increase in equal measure.
But apothecaries worried that they were often duped with substitutes, plants that were more easily obtained than the real thing. This is why, on 13 July 1629, the young English apothecary, Thomas Johnson, shut up his shop at the sign of the Red Lion in Snow Hill and set out with a group of like-minded friends on an expedition to Kent. It was the first of a series of journeys they planned into different areas of the country, collecting the wild plants they saw, noting their characteristics and known uses and trying, for the first time, to establish some kind of consensus as to what plants grew in Britain and what they should be called.
This naming of names was a process that had been going on in Italy and France for some time before it happened in England; Johnson’s journey and the motive behind it had been inspired by the young Italian botanist Ulysse Aldrovandi’s expedition to the Sibilline Mountains of Tuscany in 1557, the first journey ever undertaken in Europe with the aim of recording the plants of a specific area. Aldrovandi, of course, would not have called himself a botanist. That word didn’t appear in print until the great English plantsman, John Ray, introduced it at the beginning of the 18th century. The study of plants, though, was intimately connected with the study of medicine. A 16th-century apothecary, surgeon or doctor had to be a plantsman. Aldrovandi, who had studied at Bologna under the great teacher, Luca Ghini, was part of a pan-European network, an information exchange, a 16th-century internet that connected all those interested in a better understanding of the natural world. By introducing a system of nomenclature, they tried to bring order to that world, setting alongside the common names a set of Latin names, agreed by gradual consensus, advanced by contact with other enquirers in other countries, a system that could be universally understood.
But alongside this practical, pharmaceutical reason for wanting to pin the right labels on things, was another wider imperative: the desire to make sense of the natural world, to search for the rules of Nature’s game. Gradually, the active and the secular gained precedence over the religious, contemplative mode that had defined the Middle Ages in Europe. The spirit and culture of the Renaissance encouraged classical scholarship, scientific discovery, geographical exploration, a sense of the potential of the human mind. Art escaped from its religious straitjacket. And long before writers had found a vocabulary to describe plants, painters were producing staggeringly beautiful (and exact) images of them.
Already between 1280 and 1300, an unknown artist, probably based in Salerno, had produced for the first time portraits of plants that danced and sang and could tell you their names. In the pages of his manuscript in the British Library you’ll find gorgeous maidenhair fern (the stalks laid diagonally in a bold pattern across the page); realistic broad beans with fat juicy pods; the unmistakable dappled leaves of lungwort. Following this came an extraordinary series of soft explosions (notably the Carrara Herbal, also in the British Library), each one carrying a little further the artist’s purpose in portraying plants exactly as they appeared before his own eyes.
In their new freedom, plants escaped from herbals into tapestries. They decorated prayer books and flowed round the borders of illuminated manuscripts. They invaded paintings. They bloomed on the great doors that Lorenzo Ghiberti made for the baptistry of Florence Cathedral. By 1438-40, when Antonio Pisanello painted his famous portrait of Margherita Gonzaga (it’s in the Louvre in Paris), real columbines, real pinks with fringed petals and stamens as fine as the curled tongues of butterflies were scattered against the bosky background.
Of course printing, when it was invented (the first text to be produced by the new process was the indulgence printed at Mainz in 1454) had a cataclysmic effect on the spread of knowledge. Until then, information was a personal asset or property, passed at its possessor’s discretion from hand to hand, by word of mouth, by letter. Each person in possession of this information could add or subtract from it before passing it on. The printed book changed the way information was received. It set down markers. They were not necessarily the right ones, but they provided an agenda, a fixed point from which the search for truth could continue.
The earliest printed plant book, a German herbal, appeared within 30 years of Gutenburg’s great invention, but the first bestseller, the first new printed herbal to be read throughout Europe was written in 1530 by Otto Brunfels, a Carthusian monk turned Lutheran schoolmaster. The key to the book’s success were not the words, mostly cobbled together from classical texts, but the woodcuts contributed by Hans Weiditz, draughtsman, engraver and pupil of the great Albrecht Drer. ‘Be guided by nature,’ his mentor had written. ‘Do not depart from it, thinking that you can do better yourself.’ Unlike Brunfels, Weiditz was not a copyist. He drew direct from life. He created the first printed images of plants ” waterlily, nettle, plantain, liverwort, vervain, lesser celandine, borage, wood anemone, Pasque flower ” that could be unequivocally recognised throughout Europe. Artists, not writers, paved the way for the botanical Renaissance in Europe.
Germany, as represented by Brunfels and his successor, Leonhart Fuchs, snatches the credit for publishing the first important books on plants. But almost all the other critical discoveries and early innovations happened in Italy. Many of the men who, through my five- year quest, emerged as the early heroes of my narrative were based in the Italian universities of the late 15th and early 16th centuries.
Which is why, one Saturday morning, on 2 November, I’m walking in the strangely undisturbed Tuscany of the Valdarno, trying hard to forget what I know. Unless I can clear my mind of all that has happened since the Renaissance ” the work of Linnaeus and Darwin, the discovery of DNA ” I won’t be able to appreciate the achievements of these early plantsmen. So, for six weeks, I search for the landscapes of their minds, walking on this particular day along an old stone-cobbled track. Perhaps four hours’ riding would bring a Florentine out into these forests, these stone-paved tracks. Drifting in my direction is the comfortable smell of sheep. They are huddled under a small shelter, guarded by a dog tied to a tree; when he leaps out to bark at me, the tree (an elder) shakes and makes an old bell tied in its branches ring out loud alarm. Set into a stone niche is a small glazed pottery plaque of the Madonna, painted blue, white and yellow. In a little pot underneath someone has put sky- blue flowers of chicory, white daisies and toadflax in acid-drop yellow. Behind me in the distance I can still see the tall, narrow tower of the church whose bell I can hear from my room at Santa Maddalena. Alongside the track are mounds of red rose hips, old man’s beard, and occasional eruptions of spindle berries, the pink an extraordinary colour at this time of year. Schiaparelli. ‘Salve!’ calls a man picking olives at the top of a ladder propped in his orchard. ‘Salve!’ I reply, raising an arm to return his salute. I’m thinking of the 16th century, but he’s even further back, addressing me in the language of Pliny.
My men ” the charismatic Luca Ghini, who in 1544 set up the botanic garden at Pisa, the first in Europe, and his brilliant pupil Andrea Cesalpino, born in Arezzo ” they would have seen all these same things, I’m thinking. The physical landscape, its trees and flowers, have changed astonishingly little. I sit on a grassy bank, eat prosciutto stuffed inside a fresh white ciabatta, bought at the baker’s in Donnini, pick wild apples and figs for pudding. Next to me, the pale celadon-green flower buds of the stinking hellebore are just beginning to show above its evergreen leaves. Behind, the early foliage of irises and narcissi pushes through the marbled leaves of wild arum ” one of the plants that Hans Weiditz illustrated in great detail in Brunfels’s book of 1530. Tufted tongues of wallflowers, pinks and marigolds lick out from the huge blocks of stone in the retaining wall along the track.
I return by a different path through the woods. Though I can’t see them, I can hear pigs grunting softly, snuffling up acorns. Bright red berries of butcher’s broom light up the undergrowth. Scuffling through beech leaves, I come into a clearing where colchicums are pushing out their last flowers, and two grazing deer look up, momentarily frozen as if in a fresco, before running off into the trees.
In a world that is increasingly homogenised, we see strengths in the distinctiveness of local names: butcher’s broom, wallflower, marigold. But they can be muddling. Brasavola, writing of the plant he called Primula veris, said that the herb women called it petrella, others called it St Peter’s herb, or herba paralysis or margarita, ‘so much are people given to imposing names each according to his own fancy’. Renaissance scholars could already see that any system they devised had to have universal validity. They had a universal language ” Latin ” at hand, and so the simplest thing was to use this language to forge a system that, eventually, could accommodate every thing that lived on earth. In their own way, artists such as Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci had begun the process by producing images of plants that all could recognise. The right words proved more difficult to find. In the Italian universities and their associated botanic gardens, the great debate began and it drew in scholars from all over Europe. Because the quest for order, for understanding, was a defining feature of the age, it engaged the attention of the most magnificent scholars.
‘Look,’ I want to say to the clusters of tourists in the Uffizzi, being fed their gobbets of art history by German-speaking, Japanese- speaking, French- speaking, English-speaking guides. ‘Look, it’s not just about perspective or painterly techniques or the search for symbols. My men were riding through those landscapes, discussing those trees, their provenance, their cousinships with other plants. University students were petitioning, not for courses on art history, but for information about those plants you’re looking at. By the time Botticelli died, Luca Ghini was already 20 years old. Those famous Primavera flowers aren’t just ciphers. Scholars were growing them, writing to each other about them. They are central to this new beginning.’
By the middle of the 16th century, a rough map could be made of almost the whole world (with the important exception of Australia and New Zealand). It was now obvious that, as Sir Walter Raleigh put it, God had not ‘shut up all light of learning within the lanthorn of Aristotle’s braines’. More plants existed in more places than the ancients had ever known. In Italy, with its long, hot summers, the first successful attempts were made to cultivate maize, sweet potatoes, potatoes, runner beans, French beans, pineapples, sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes. By 1550 the first tomatoes were being enthusiastically grown, not for food but for their potential as aphrodisiacs. By 1585 peppers were fruiting abundantly all over Italy, as well as in Spanish Castile and Moravia (central Czechoslovakia). Just as the revival of anatomy in Italian universities had stimulated the renaissance of medicine, so the introduction of plant studies encouraged direct observation, rational criticism, intellectual scepticism and a long-overdue questioning of classical dogma.
Aided by artists then, the botanists and naturalists of the Renaissance set out along the long road towards consensus in the naming of names. Botanic gardens were established at Pisa and Padua. Disaffected Protestants, barred from studying at the University in Paris, swept out of Antwerp by Philip II of Spain and his Catholic crusades, finding themselves suddenly on the wrong side of the religious fence in England, gathered under Guillaume Rondelet at the famous medical school at Montpellier in the south of France, exchanged information, dispersed, and later established new centres of excellence in northern Europe. Two-hundred-thousand Huguenots, who in Flanders had established themselves as particularly knowledgeable and gifted growers and nurserymen, left France to settle in Switzerland, Germany, England and the Netherlands. Out of this persecution came progress, as the floods of immigrants swirling through Europe brought with them fresh information about plants and created new networks, new webs of knowledge.
But with each new wave of introductions from abroad, the pressure to sort, discriminate, and organise plants into a rational system of nomenclature increased. When plants began to pour in from the newly settled lands of America, the task became even more urgent. The Spaniard Nicolas Monardes was the first to describe the cornucopia of hitherto unknown plants that grew in this strange territory and already by 1577 his book, which included reports of novelties such as sunflower and tobacco, had been translated into English under the winning title Joyfull news out of the newe founde worlde.
The business of naming plant names was an essential preliminary to understanding how they might be related to each other. But I’m not telling a series of just-so stories ” How the Primrose Got its Name and so on. I’m attempting to track a great swirling web of knowledge, refined over more than 2,000 years, that takes in the cultured scholars of Islam, the first expeditions to the Indies, the first assessments of the natural world. The story I’m telling starts in Athens, c. 300BC, where Aristotle’s pupil, Theophrastus asks the first important questions about plants: What have we got? What are the similarities and differences between them? Two-thousand people came to hear his lectures at the Lyceum and his Enquiry into Plants was the first work on the subject ever produced in Europe.
My narrative effectively ends with the death of John Ray at the beginning of the 18th century. Isolated in his Essex cottage, his legs covered in running sores that he bathed in a mixture of dock root and chalk, Ray set down his last words on the subject that had intrigued and sustained him since his student days in Cambridge. The Six Rules that Ray proposed provided the vital underpinning of a new discipline and his insistence on the importance of method before system was critical in shaping future thinking on the subject. With Ray’s death, the study of plants left the philosophers behind and engaged instead with a new breed of men, the scientists of the Enlightenment. There was still much work to do, and Ray understood that, as well as recognising how his achievements might seem to those looking back over another 300 years of progress. ‘I predict that our descendants will reach such heights in the sciences that our proudest discoveries will seem slight, obvious, almost worthless,’ he wrote. ‘They will be tempted to pity our ignorance and to wonder that truths easy and manifest were for so long hidden and were so esteemed by us, unless they are generous enough to remember that we broke the ice for them, and smoothed the first approach to the heights.’
Of course, the story does not really end with Ray. He establishes the study of plants as a scientific discipline. He gives this study a new name: botany. Ray is the last of the heroes whose work has gradually shifted the study of plants away from superstition and towards science. But this particular story cannot have an end. As ways of seeing change, new things are seen. New relationships are revealed. New ways of sorting plants become possible ” inevitable even. Spectacles had helped Fuchs. He’s wearing them in the portrait that his artist, Albrecht Meyer, prepared for De historia stirpium (1542). The first microscope, invented towards the end of the 16th century, showed Ray and his contemporary Nehemiah Grew complexities in the structure of plants that previous scholars could never have dreamt of. But ahead of Ray are electron microscopes, Watson and Crick, the double helix, DNA. The task of defining and categorising the natural world which had previously belonged to philosophers and naturalists has now, in the 21st century, been taken over by physicists, phytochemists, molecular systematicists, who are just as driven by the need to sort and order, to find perfection in hierarchy and classification as my men ever were.
So a final journey takes me to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to meet Professor Mark Chase, head of the molecular systematics section. The big money that went into the human genome project generated techniques which quickly filtered into other disciplines. By analysing the DNA of plants, scientists can now work out a kind of evolutionary tree, and make clear relationships that no outward character could ever suggest. So in Leiden, where in 1593 Clusius went to set up a new botanic garden, the old-order beds are being re- laid to reflect the new classification. In Oxford’s botanic garden, founded in 1621 so that ‘learning may be improved’, the order beds last set out in 1884 according to Bentham and Hooker’s rules of nomenclature, are once again being dug up and rearranged. A new order has begun.
Extracted from ‘The Naming of Names’, by Anna Pavord, published on 28 October by Bloomsbury, pounds 30. To buy this book for the special price of pounds 27, including p&p, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
FLOWER POWER
Left: Anna Pavord (left) in the Tien Shan mountains. Right: a sunflower, as it appeared in the ‘Hortus Eystettensis’, 1613
A LEAF OUT OF HIS BOOK
Above: a plate from a manuscript made in Salerno between 1280 and 1310. Right: a detail from Botticelli’s ‘Primavera’, c. 1478
PORTRAIT OF THE BOTANIST
Above: the English plantsman John Ray (1627-1705), who laid down the rules for a modern system of plant names. Below: the common poppy from Benedetto Rinio’s herbal, the ‘Liber de Simplicibus’, 1419