Non Sum Qualis Eram

This post is a cautionary tale travelling from the heights of Mount Olympus via some impassioned Decadent poetry, with a detour to the Deep South of the American Civil War, to end ignobly with a snarling dog.

It begins mundanely with a bored housewife picking snails off the leaves of a globe artichoke. I wonder, she muses, if these leaves can produce a dye. Within a couple of hours she had the answer: yes, they can, an impressively deep yellow.

In her little world this is an exciting discovery. She looks up the scientific name of the artichoke to see if it belongs to a family of other plants who may be similarly generous.

Cynara scolymus

Digging deeper she finds a tragic legend attached to the Cynara family.

"According to Greek myth" - and here the cautionary bit of the tale begins - Cynara was a beautiful maiden living on the island of Zinari.  Zeus, who was visiting his brother Poseidon,  saw her and fell in love. He made her a goddess [the Jungians and feminists amongst us will no doubt have words to say on this story] and brought her up to Olympus. However, sensible woman, she missed mortal earth and would sneak back down when he wasn't looking. When he found this out he got cross and turned her into an artichoke. Not one of his most imaginative efforts, I'd say. Not his usual swans, willows, or fawns, but there you go.

This story is repeated whenever someone writes about artichokes. Go see for yourself ...

Sniffing out a possible blog post the housewife searched online for the original Greek telling of the tale, but couldn't find it. No matter, maybe it is not important enough to appear in the first few pages of a Google search. What did turn up was the Roman poet Horace bewailing someone called Cynara.

After a long cessation, O Venus, again are you stirring up tumults? Spare me, I beseech you, I beseech you. I am not the man I was under the dominion of good-natured Cynara. Forbear, O cruel mother of soft desires, to bend one bordering upon fifty, now too hardened for soft commands:

The gist is he has seen an attractive young man, and felt  'tumults' stirring, but at nearly fifty thinks he hasn't the energy to pursue them, since he is not the same as when he knew good-natured Cynara.

Ask Me No More by Alma Tadema

Who was Cynara? Did she resemble an artichoke in any way?

Who knows.

Two thousand years later Horace's lament inspired another male poet to muse on the nature of love. Ernest Dowson, a Decadent poet, wrote 'Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae'. The title translates as 'I am not as I was in the reign of good Cynara'.  The gist is he is with a red-lipped woman and suddenly remembers lily white Cynara.

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
    When I awoke and found the dawn was grey:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion

Maybe being associated with a vegetable is not such a bad thing. That's three men with fond memories of Cynara.

At this stage in the cautionary tale a web of romance has woven around our Artichoke.

To weave another thread we can take a detour to Vivien Leigh's heaving bossom.

The title of the book Gone With The Wind was taken from a line in Dowson's poem:

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind

The author Margaret Mitchell was touched by the "far away, faintly sad sound" of the line.

But this has nothing to do with Artichokes.

Back to the scientific name Cynara scolymus

And here the romance comes to a juddering end.

'Cynara' is an amalgam of the Latin word for canine and the Old Greek word for dog, 'kyon'. The 'scolymus' element relates to words such as spiny and thistle.  These descriptive words are referencing the dogs tooth like spines on the stem of the plant.

Dog Tooth Spines on Artichoke
Plus Pesky Snails

So we seem to have been led down the wrong path. Artichokes are not associated with a mistreated woman, but sharp dog teeth.  Our English word artichoke probably comes from its original Roman (latin) name for cardoon, a similar vegetable.

The caution here is to beware what you read. If something gets repeated enough it becomes fact. 'According to Greek myth' is a phrase best taken with a pinch of salt.

Shiny Blowfly

I know! I too go all shivery looking at this fly. I'd rather not, but he happened to sit still long enough for me to take a close up, so we might as well. Knowledge is power and all that.

To start with, yes he is a common greenbottle (as opposed to bluebottle), and he is unfortunately a blowfly. Which is a bit worrying because they lay their eggs on dead things. I'm concerned that Garden 65 is littered with the poor little bodies of dead mice and birds. I hope not.

On the plus side he has an interesting binomial name: Lucilia ceasar, which means Shining Ceasar. This name was given by Carl Linaeus, the founder of the modern taxonomy system. I wonder what it was about this nasty fly that reminded Carl of imperialist Rome.

Here's the science bit:

you notice his thorax (the top bit that we can see is called a scutum) has lots of bristles (setae) on it? Well, apparently that patterning of those bristles is how those who take an interest in flies (diptera) manage to distinguish one species from another. Now I've gone cross-eyed trying to find the definitive explanation of our fly's bristles (I mean, setae) but can't find it, so I shall report back on what I've found so far.

That first deep groove behind the head and before the wings is called the transverse suture. There are many names for the position of the bristles (ah! setae) but lets keep it simple and say our fly has lots of postsutural dorsocentral setae.

I'm sure you'll be able to impress someone with that observation next time you see a shiny fly.

My Compost Heap Frightens Me

At the end of the garden lurks an oozing, pulsing heap of darkness.

I try to ignore it. I smile at the innocent little daisies on the lawn, admire the pretty ladybirds, glory in the swifts overhead and am grateful for the beauty all around. But the horrible truth cannot be denied: Decay resides in a far corner. Busy Decay at that.

Edgar Allan Poe missed a trick by not making a compost heap the menacing centre of a short story. Like the portrait in the attic, or the maddening beat of a heart, the compost bin sits, doom laden, forever warning of the end that awaits us all.

I suppose you've got to get to grips with this reality if you are a gardener - a thoughtful, ecologically aware, bit of a depressive kind of gardener anyway. The cycle of life and all that. You put dead plants in, let an Hieronymus Bosch horde of creatures eat it up, then eventually get life-giving compost out at the end. Grim.

 

A Yellow Slug, Limax flavus (Lt flavus = yellow)

White-lipped Snail, Cepaea hortensis (Lt hortensis = garden)

Naked Fruiting Bodies

You, it being winter with few plants alive in Garden65, thought you were free from mind-numbing taxonomy lessons, but no ... ha ha ... you forgot the mushrooms!

Last weekend, whilst rummaging around in that oppressive growth of ivy I came across a secret community of mushrooms. They were growing on the dead stump of a ceanothus. This had been a bush that had grown beyond its intended boundaries so I invited the hunkiest tree-surgeon in Didsbury to come and shave a few branches off and tame its exuberance. Unfortunately he did such a good job it died completely. The ivy is pleased with this outcome because it has something else to cling too, and now it seems the fungi are having a go at it too.

These little mushrooms are, as far as I can tell, Common Rustgills, no doubt because they are all over the place, and orange. Their taxonomic name is Gymnopilus penetrans. It is of the Order, Agaricacles, and the Family, Strophariaceae.

Let’s have a rummage around those names – just for the fun of it:

According to Wikipedia the Order they belong to, the Agricacles, are ‘a type of fungal fruiting body characterised by a pileus (cap) which is clearly differentiated from the stipe (stalk) with lamellae (gills) on the underside of the pileus’.

You will find the pileus is the defining feature of our little mushroomy friends.

The next step in refinement is their Family, the Strophariaceae. These are characterised by their ‘cutis-type pileipellis’. Their what? The pileipellis is the ‘uppermost layer in the pileus that covers the fleshy tissue of the fruit body’. Oh, OK.

Right, so what does their name mean (I’m sure, like me, you are intrigued to know)?

Gymnopilus apparently means ‘naked pileus’. The Greek word for naked is ‘gymnos’, and is where the word gymnasium comes from - all those nude Greek wrestlers, and all that. Now you’re interested aren't you?

‘Penetrans’ I daren’t Google.

So, to recap, our mushrooms our named after their cutis-type, clearly differentiated, naked and probably penetrating caps. Got it.

...............................

In a not unrelated anecdote we came across a little mushroom on one of our walks in the Lakes at Christmas. We identified it, not unreasonably, as a Sphagnum Brownie (who you will be pleased to know is also of the Agaricacles/Strophariaceae tribe). Back at the cottage after lighting the fire and opening another box of chocolates I got the IPad out to see if this mushroom was edible. In my innocence I Googled: 'Mushroom Brownie Recipe'. I don't think I need to elucidate further the types of results that produced.

The Romance and Science of Cranesbills

While chasing Sheila the Shield Bug around the geraniums I noticed the flower’s ornate seed heads. That lovely curl wouldn’t look amiss on an iron gate, or an elegant art nouveau copper lamp. My dream ‘Arts and Crafts mansion’ (doesn’t everyone have one?) would definitely have shapes like that somewhere in it.

In reality what is happening here is very interesting.

Unlike the daisies we looked at before the geranium doesn't lie back once the seeds have been generated and passively let wind or animals disperse them. It's involvement is more active.

The seeds themselves form against a long column, or 'beak', that grows up from the old flower head. When they are ripe the beak splits and springs each seed upwards. The force of this movement should be enough to fling the seeds a distance away from the main plant.

Which doesn't seem to have happened in the above picture.


 Here are a couple of diagrams that explain my understanding of the action.

Having dealt with the science bit we can return to the world of imagination.

As I'm sure you are aware the other name for geraniums is cranesbill. I think the pink ones growing in Garden65 are wood cranesbill (Geranium sylvaticum). And why are they called cranesbill? Because that column that flings the seeds away reminded someone sometime of a 'crane's bill'. It's not called a beak for nothing.

Source

I wonder who originally thought of that connection. Was it some peasant walking in a woodland in late summer who picked a geranium, saw the shape of the seed head, then glanced up over the nearby marshy fields towards a group of cranes and thought, "That looks like that. From now on I'll call this plant 'cranesbill'"? Would it happen like that? Or maybe the scientist who formally identified the plant and added it to his grand taxonomy scheme whimsically gave it an amusing name. I wonder what it is called in other countries.

Flower Infographic

Daisies make a return to Garden 65 - this time in the guise of their taller cousins, oxeye daisies.

A beautiful swathe of daisies has opened up at the same time as the fox and cubs. They occupy only a small space, about a metre square, but if you take a step in and squint a bit you can pretend you're in a summer meadow. And if you wear a floaty dress and sandals you might even get the full 'summer of love' effect, but as you see I didn’t go that far.

'Oxeye' seems a strange epithet for a white flower. Let me explain the reason for the association ...

• daisies were used in ancient times to help with wound healing.
  Apparently the Romans carried mashed up daisies with them on their marches
  
• Hera, the goddess of war, was called ‘ox-eyed’
  
• War – wounds – daisies – goddess of war – oxeye           ta da!
  

But it seems whoever the scholarly person was that first associated the flower with Hera’s nickname may have got his Greek translation wrong. The literal translation of the Greek word βοωπις is ‘cow-faced’, which was not necessarily a criticism of her looks, but could refer to her earlier more primitive guise as a horned cow goddess (think Catal Huyuk). But I digress. Perhaps we should ask Mary Beard to sort this one out.

The orange hawkweed, for that is what ‘fox and cubs’ is more properly called, has a lot of strange names associated with it. Surprisingly, given its scrappy character, it is not a native of Britain but was introduced in the 17th century as a medicinal herb to be used for eye problems. So any names attached to it must have only developed over the last 400 odd years.

The fox and cubs epithet apparently refers to the appearance of the flower clusters. If you look closely you can see one main flower on a stem with many unopened buds crowded behind it. The image implied is rather sweetly of a red mother fox hiding her darker little cubs underneath her. Awww.

Another of its names is ‘Grim the Collier’. This explanation is a little more muddled:

• The plant has black hairs = looks like it is covered in coal dust
  
• Grim the Collier was a well-known folk figure of the 17th century
  
• A play was written in 1662 called ‘Grim the Collier of Croydon’ in which the devil comes up to earth to find out how naughty women are (and then discovers they are naughty but also clever, so he goes back down again)

I’m not sure the relevance of the last point, but there seems a general reference to the dark colouring of the stems and unopened flower buds and the fiery foxy orange of the flower.

Those ancients were an imaginative bunch weren’t they? Suppose us moderns would be too if we didn’t have tv and twitter.

In the picture below I’ve combined my fleeting interest in taxonomy with the new online fashion of ‘infographics’ (diagrams to you and me) to produce some no doubt fleetingly interesting information on these two flowers.

They both belong to the family Asteraceae, which used to be called the Chrysanthemum family, and this is because, as I understand it, the shape of their flowers is star-like. And, full circle, we are back to the Greeks.

(made in Word, saved as pdf, opened in PhotoShop, saved as jpg)

Hoverfly Buried Under Taxa

Humans have an innate desire to name things, to put them in their proper place. The world seems a safer place if you know what is in front you.

It is a basic animal instinct to categorise. Some animals may only need to know what is edible or not. Others have to distinguish between the thing that wants to eat me and the thing that wants to mate with me.

But humans have language. For us it is not enough to simple ‘know’, to have a visceral instinctive knowledge, we have to put words onto objects. A named object is then pinned down. We can now ask questions of it and judge and compare it to other similarly labelled objects. Our ‘superiority’ as an animal species lies on our ability to confer meaning onto something and then exploit it for our benefit.

Eastern philosophies however consider naming a dangerous activity. It not only traps the phenomena, but us, the labellers. The result is a fixed world where once something has been recognised and reduced to its name it is filed away with all similar things deep inside our subconscious.

“That is a daffodil. It is yellow.”

“That is a weed. It is ugly.”

“That is a slug. All slugs are slimy.”

But in so quickly dismissing the object in front of us we do not experience it as a unique and complex entity. We do not truly see it. Our whole world view is then in danger of becoming impoverished. Ask any artist, or person who spends time quietly meditating, what they gain from looking and looking again - a different world opens up, and yet it is same one that existed before we made the effort to take away the label.

And yet, although I believe this, and occasionally remember to take a better look, I can’t resist my humanity and have to find out from a book or Google (those palaces of words) the exact identification of whatever this thing is before me.

Thus I present today’s “What’s that?!”

It is a hover fly. I took this picture a few days (weeks?!) ago when it was sunny (remember then?). This guy was one of many flying insects sipping nectar (or eating pollen?) from the lime green Euphorbia. There were wasps, bees, flies, ladybirds, and a few of these lithe and stripy chaps.

Scrutinising a ‘All About Hover Flies' site I’m guessing my hoverfly is a Parasyrphus punctulatus (don’t quote me on it) ... what a long and esoteric classification ... wonder what that means ...

..... this tiny delicate hover fly is burdened with 22 labels!

Humans, in their anxiety to pin him down, have created 22 taxa (taxonomic units), which I’ve tried to delineate in the table below, to completely describe him.

Would he be the same without them? Is my world better for knowing them?

*faint whisper from far corner of psyche ...“ ’yis ”*

hoverfly taxa

Bluebell Intrigue

Us gardening types know our native bluebells are threatened by imported Spanish bluebells.

(Do we have any native wildlife NOT under threat, for heaven’s sake? Red squirrels, ladybirds, crayfish ...)

But what is the difference between a native and a Johnny foreigner bluebell? The National History Museum has a detailed set of pages that describe each type. It appears that as far as size is concerned there is little difference between the two. For example, the leaves of a native can be 20-45cm long, and those of a Spanish bluebell, 20-50cm. Given the variance of size amongst a large population covering a woodland floor I doubt that extra 5cm would be obvious.

I do like to pin things down with numbers though, so I did a little investigation of my own by measuring 10 bluebells in my garden, which I assume are Spanish straight from the garden centre, and 10 from Styal Woods in Cheshire, where natives thrive. Yes, average leaf lengths were indeed the same at 21.5cm and 21.75cm respectively. Leaf width did vary, with the bluebells from the garden being wider than natives, which reflects the official expectation. However, the conclusion that has to be made from this little unscientific exercise is that you don’t need to go wielding a ruler into the woods, because bluebells of whatever nationality are more or less similar in size.

Given the romance of these beautiful flowers it is fitting that it is by eye and nose rather than ruler that species is found. The differences are more discernible in the shape of the flowers themselves. Native flowers are more droopy (why am I not surprised?) with petals that roll back, compared to cultivated ones that have widely spreading petals. And this does seem to be demonstrated in the photos I took in each location. The flowers on the left are native and do seem to be longer and more curled.

The final distinction however is perhaps the best reason we should be trying to secure the existence of our bluebell woods: native flowers are strongly and sweetly scented. It is not simply because they are ours; it is because they are wonderful in their own right.

Now, here is something I bet you didn’t know about bluebells. The latin name for British bluebells is Hyacinthoides non-scripta. ‘Hyacinthoides’ is the plant’s genus, i.e. all bluebells are of this taxa, and means ‘like a hyacinth’. The ‘non-scripta’ species name is intriguing. It refers to the Greek myth surrounding the beautiful young Spartan prince, Hyacinthus, lover of the god Apollo. One day they were happily (search for the pun I didn’t use here) throwing a discus to each other. Hyacinth ran to catch it to impress Apollo, but was tragically struck by the discus and died. Distraught, Apollo made a flower, the hyacinth, from his spilled blood and wrote (or marked with his tears) ‘alas’ on the petal as a sign of his sorrow. ‘Non-inscripta’ means ‘unwritten’ – it was not written on by Apollo. It is as if the taxonomist who named the flower was saying bluebells are like Hyacinths, ‘but not that one.’

To add to the intrigue earlier taxonomists called British bluebells ‘Endymion non-scripta’. Once again there is the association with a beautiful Greek boy.